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Title: The collected works of William Hazlitt, Vol. 03 (of 12)
Author: Hazlitt, William
Language: English
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THE
COLLECTED WORKS OF WILLIAM HAZLITT
IN TWELVE VOLUMES
VOLUME THREE
_All rights reserved_
[Illustration: _Milton’s house N^o. 19, York Street, Westminster,
occupied by Hazlitt 1812–1819._]
THE COLLECTED WORKS OF
WILLIAM HAZLITT
EDITED BY A. R. WALLER
AND ARNOLD GLOVER
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
W. E. HENLEY
❦
Free Thoughts on Public Affairs
Political Essays
Advertisement, etc., from The Eloquence of the British Senate
❦
1902
LONDON: J. M. DENT & CO.
McCLURE, PHILLIPS & CO.: NEW YORK
Edinburgh: T. and A. CONSTABLE, (late) Printers to Her Majesty
CONTENTS
PAGE
FREE THOUGHTS ON PUBLIC AFFAIRS 1
POLITICAL ESSAYS 25
ADVERTISEMENT, ETC., FROM THE ELOQUENCE OF THE BRITISH SENATE 387
NOTES 427
FREE THOUGHTS ON PUBLIC AFFAIRS
IN A LETTER ADDRESSED TO
A MEMBER OF THE OLD OPPOSITION
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
This pamphlet of 46 8vo pages was published by the author himself in
1806. The title-page was ‘Free Thoughts on Public Affairs, or Advice to
a Patriot; in a Letter addressed to a Member of the Old Opposition.
London, Printed by Taylor & Co., Shoe Lane, and sold by J. Budd, Crown &
Mitre, Pall Mall, 1806.’ Mr. W. C. Hazlitt reprinted the pamphlet from
the author’s own copy in 1885 (Bohn’s Library, _The Spirit of the Age,
etc._), and that reprint forms the text of the present edition. The
pamphlet is exceedingly rare. Mr. Alexander Ireland knew of only one
copy, that which belonged to Mr. W. C. Hazlitt. This he caused to be
transcribed; but it has not been possible to collate the present text
with either the original or Mr. Ireland’s transcription.
ADVICE TO A PATRIOT;
IN A LETTER ADDRESSED
TO A MEMBER OF THE OLD OPPOSITION
Sir, If the opposition of character between the individuals of different
nations is that which attaches every one the most strongly to his own
country; if the love of liberty instilled from our very cradle is any
security for the hatred of oppression; if a spirit of independence, and
a constitutional stubbornness of temper are not forward to crouch under
the yoke of unjust ambition; if to look up with heartfelt admiration to
the great names, whether heroes or sages, which England has produced,
and to be unwilling that the country which gave birth to Shakespear and
Milton should ever be enslaved by a mean and servile foe; if to love its
glory—that virtue, that integrity, that genius, which have distinguished
it from all others, and in which its true greatness consists,—is to love
one’s country, there are few persons who have a better right than myself
(on the score of sincerity) to offer that kind of advice which is the
subject of the following letter, however weak or defective it may be
found.
To love one’s country is to wish well to it; to prefer its interests to
our own; to oppose every measure inconsistent with its welfare; and to
be ready to sacrifice ease, health, and life itself in its defence. But
there is a false kind of patriotism, loud and noisy, and ever ready to
usurp that name from others, as an honourable covering either for
selfish designs or blind zeal, to which I shall make no pretensions. It
has been called patriotism, to flatter those in power at the expense of
the people; to sail with the stream; to make a popular prejudice the
stalking-horse of ambition, to mislead first and then betray; to enrich
yourself out of the public treasure; to strengthen your influence by
pursuing such measures as give to the richest members of the community
an opportunity of becoming richer, and to laugh at the waste of blood
and the general misery which they occasion; to defend every act of a
party, and to treat all those as enemies of their country who do not
think the pride of a minister and the avarice of a few of his creatures
of more consequence than the safety and happiness of a free, brave,
industrious, and honest people; to strike at the liberty of other
countries, and through them at your own; to change the maxims of a
state, to degrade its spirit, to insult its feelings, and tear from it
its well-earned and proudest distinctions; to soothe the follies of the
multitude, to lull them in their sleep, to goad them on in their
madness, and, under the terror of imaginary evils, to cheat them of
their best privileges; to blow the blast of war for a livelihood in
journals and pamphlets, and by spreading abroad incessantly a spirit of
defiance, animosity, suspicion, distrust, and the most galling contempt,
to make it impossible that we should ever remain at peace or in safety,
while insults and general obloquy have a tendency to provoke those
passions in others which they are intended to excite.
Being then of opinion, that to flatter is not always the duty of a
friend; that it is no part of the love of one’s country to be blind to
her errors, or to wish her to persist in them; I may take the liberty of
stating freely such observations as have occurred to an unprejudiced but
not indifferent spectator on the present state of things: and there is
at least this advantage in reflections which are not the echo of the
popular cry, that something may be found in them, however unsupported or
frivolous in general, which may be turned to good account by persons of
sounder judgment and more extensive means of information. It has been
said that ‘there is wisdom in a multitude of counsellors;’ but if they
only raise a clamour by repeating all of them the same thing, I do not
see how this advantage can be obtained.
What I would chiefly remark upon is,—How far the principles and views
acted upon by the late administrations are such as to afford us the
safest and most honourable ground for prosecuting a war which is said to
be carried on for the existence of the empire.
Had I to engage with an enemy in a struggle of this kind, the ground
which I should choose to occupy would be such a one as that he must feel
himself to be the aggressor. In a conflict which is to decide the fate
of a people, I think the greatest care should be taken to remove all
doubtful or frivolous causes of debate, to suffer no sinister motives to
divert their minds from the great object in which they are engaged or
lessen their steady confidence in the justice of their cause. It is
hardly to be expected that the mass of a people should defend the
patrimony of independence which they inherit from their ancestors with
the reverence, intrepidity, and dauntless zeal required of them, when
they see a minister ready to gamble it away for the first idle object
that excites his cupidity, or opens a door to the spirit of intrigue.
Examining the conduct of those who were the advisers and authors of the
late renewal of hostilities according to these maxims, which seem to me
well founded, it is not easy to imagine any thing more remote from true
dignity, magnanimity, or wisdom, than the manner in which we chose to
enter upon a war on which we were to stake our all. We chose to rest a
dispute, which was to involve every thing near and dear to us, on a
diplomatic ambiguity; on a technical question, as to the manner how and
to whom we were to give up a barren rock which was of no use to us, and
to which we had resigned all pretensions. It was clear that we had
refused to fulfil our share of a treaty which had been formally
ratified; but the reasons which we gave for doing this were by no means
equally clear and satisfactory. They sounded more like the excuses of
those seeking a pretence for the continuance of an unsuccessful contest,
than the remonstrances of persons sincerely anxious for peace, and
opposed by real difficulties. I remember at the time when the design of
retaining Malta was first made known, every one’s remark was,—Had we not
agreed to give it up? And as to the official reasons for this change of
measures, which were afterwards detailed to the public with such pomp
and circumstance, viz., that it was to have been given up to the Order
that formerly possessed it only on the supposition of that Order’s
remaining entire, though no such condition had been expressed, and under
the guarantee of another power whose consent had neither been asked or
obtained, I believe that no one who was not either indifferent to peace
or desirous of war ever thought them of sufficient consequence to
justify us in exposing ourselves to unnecessary reproach and odium, and
plunging into a sea of unknown troubles. It is certain that by the
generality of people they could neither be felt nor understood. On this
tottering foundation did Mr. Addington think proper to take his stand.
Doubt, perplexity, evasion, a general indifference as to the immediate
object of the dispute, and a direct accusation of breach of faith on the
part of the enemy were the auspices under which we were to begin a war,
which ought (from the tremendous consequences attached to it) to have
had no motives but what came home to the bosoms and businesses of men;
to every manly, generous, and honest feeling; that might not have been
uttered boldly without fear of contradiction in the face of an enemy;
that must not have beat in every heart, have strung every arm, and
animated every tongue. If the situation of the country was believed to
be at all precarious; if there was even a chance that the contest might
really lead to the dreadful alternative held out to us, the want either
of cautious prudence or of manly wisdom in ministers was at that time
inexcusable. It is no part of wisdom to hang the fate of kingdoms in the
balance with straws. It is no part of courage to fight, to show that you
are not afraid of fighting. Calm steady courage does not distrust
itself; nor is it afraid that by giving up a trifling or doubtful point,
it may afterwards be bullied into dangerous compliances. Firmness and
moderation seem to me not only not incompatible with each other, but
that the one is a necessary consequence of the other. On the other hand,
meanness and pride are nearly allied together. In common life we should
think that a readiness to seize the first occasion of quarrel shewed a
man to be either a bully or a coward; it would seem as if he was afraid
that by deferring his resentment he should either want courage or
opportunity for shewing it another time. Yet the great excuse for our
going into the war was,—that by yielding any thing to the demands of the
enemy, we should soon lose all power of resistance, and crouch in abject
submission at his feet. This was not a proud confidence in ourselves,
but a mean dread of our own pusillanimity and want of firmness. It was
to suppose that we had no security for our firmness, but in the heat of
our passions and the infliction of mutual injuries. But it may be said,
that whatever was the cause of the war, the consequences were the same.
The critical situation in which we stood, and the threats of the enemy
made it necessary for us to repel force by force, to call forth every
energy of which we were possessed, and to stand forth as one man in
defence of the country. But whatever this might prove as to the conduct
of the people, it forms no justification of the conduct of ministers. It
was not the danger of invasion which produced the taking up arms, but
the determination to take up arms which produced the fear of invasion.
The threatened invasion was not the cause of the war, but the
consequence of it. This reasoning, as applied to the commencement of the
war is preposterous. It is the same absurdity as to give yourself an
infectious disease in order that you may call in the physician, instead
of calling in the physician because you are attacked by the disease. It
is ridiculous, I say, to argue that the war was necessary to repel the
horrors and ravages of invasion; when, if the war had not taken place,
no such evils would have been possible. It was true, that so long as we
determined to carry on the war, it was necessary to guard ourselves
against the consequences of war; but to suppose (which seemed to be
generally the case with the good people of England in the height of
their panic) that to doubt for a moment of the necessity of the war was
the same thing as wishing that the French might come here and put every
one to the sword (when one chief object of peace would be to prevent all
such wild alarms), implies such an intricate confusion of ideas as I am
not able to unravel. At least I can account for it only in one way; by
supposing that this reluctance to distinguish between the necessity of
our going to war, and the necessity of self-defence, brought upon us by
it, arose from a deep consciousness in the human mind of the importance
of the motives by which we have been actuated to the success of our
undertakings, and a belief that he who lessens your confidence in the
grounds of your proceeding, thereby unnerves your resolution, and
lessens your safety. I know that immediate danger, however incurred,
produces the same necessity for self-defence; but it does not produce
the same temper of mind and motives for going through it. It may also
produce the same mechanical courage at the moment; but perseverance,
superiority to fear or disaster, self-confidence, a cheerful determined
submission to the greatest hardships and sufferings from a sense that
they were unavoidable, ‘the unconquerable will, and courage never to
submit or yield, and what else is not to be overcome;’ all these are not
in the gift of fear, or folly, or ignorance, or hatred. It is therefore
of the highest consequence to ascertain the true grounds and motives of
a war, such as the present, and to know the spirit and sentiments by
which it was brought about, and to what part of our character, whether
to its strong or its weak side, whether to our vices or our virtues,
those motives were addressed which called forth our ardour and readiness
to engage in it. It is not from loud boasting, from what we think or say
of ourselves, but from what we really are; not from a pretended, but
real love of justice, of independence, of honour, and of our country’s
welfare, that we can expect the fruits of victory. If we find in those
who lead, no higher principle of action than a wish to serve their own
interests, or gratify their own passions, and in those who are led, only
that zeal which arises from the drunken uproar of an ale-house, the low
credulity of ignorance, or the idle vanity of wearing a red coat and
shouldering a firelock—I will not say that the situation of the country
is desperate indeed, but I think it is not such as to afford the most
solid grounds of confidence in our security against a spirit of
unbounded ambition; the insolence of almost unexampled success,
resentment for supposed injuries, and the most consummate military
skill. ‘The still small voice is wanting.’... It is not in the order of
nature that an administration acting upon such principles as I have here
described should feel, or be capable of inspiring into others, either
true patriotism, a sincere and manly spirit of independence, or any
particle of that high-souled energy, which is necessary to contend with
inordinate ambition, armed with strength and cunning. That
administration is no more: I trust that its spirit has not survived it!
It seems almost impertinent at present to turn back to the diplomatic
pedantry and legal quibbling by which the retention of Malta was so
gravely justified at the time. After the repeated declarations that have
been made in parliament, and after having witnessed those tragical
events, to which, it seems, it was the necessary prelude, there can be
little doubt as to the real motives of that measure. From these motives
then we are to form our opinion of the conduct of ministers. If it was a
wise and necessary measure to plunge Europe again into the calamities of
war, to bathe it once more in that ‘fountain of blood,’ then and then
only was our refusing to fulfil our engagements a wise and necessary
determination; for the now avowed reason of our going to war was, that
we might not remain at peace! Here then was a war voluntarily undertaken
for its own sake, peace studiously shunned, and all the evils consequent
upon such a step incurred, for the sake of making one more desperate
effort to reduce the power of France and humble it with the dust. We
therefore entered upon this wild Quixotic scheme at our own peril, and
the responsibility of the war devolved upon us. We ought therefore to
have had strong grounds, either from a confidence in the result or from
the justice of the principle, for making such an attempt. But we have
seen what has been the result with respect to the other powers of
Europe, it remains to be seen how it will terminate with respect to
ourselves. As to the justice and generosity of the design, I may perhaps
speak of that hereafter.
I will not pretend to censure the general practice of obtaining a war
_under false pretences_, I leave it to the politicians to settle the
rules of honour among themselves: but I cannot help thinking that in a
war which is to try the spirit of a people, they ought not to be
tricked, or bullied, or unnecessarily forced into it. With respect to
the suspension of the war in consequence of the treaty of Amiens, it
certainly had this good effect (on the supposition that it was
absolutely necessary to go on with the contest), that it gave those who
had been enemies of the old war, and had been afterwards disgusted by
the conduct of the French, but did not like to relinquish their opinion
while the original cause of dispute remained—it gave all persons of this
class (of which there were great numbers) an opportunity to quit the
ranks of discontent without exposing themselves to the charge of
inconsistency. As it was a new war, they thought they had a fair right
to have a new opinion about it; and they exercised their freedom of
election as eagerly in approving the conduct of ministers in entering
upon the present war, as they had done in condemning their continuance
of the former one. For myself, I confess I have always looked upon the
present war as a continuance of the last, carried on upon the same
principles and for the same purposes, only without any hopes of success,
and therefore infinitely more wanton and foolish. For as, in the
commencement of the last war, it was our intention to conquer France, in
this we can only hope to defend ourselves. Of the necessity of this
defence there can be but one opinion. But to confound this with the
necessity of the war itself, or to argue as if the discontinuance of the
war would increase the dangers arising from it, is an improvement in
political logic, a luminous arrangement of ideas, that must have crept
in with the benefits of the Union.
The first plea that was made use of to give a colouring of interest to
the renewal of hostilities, before the discovery of that profound train
of policy, the explosion of which has left Europe a heap of ruins, was,
that after the incautious surrender of Malta, it had been found to be of
much greater importance to Great Britain than had been imagined at the
time; and that it could not be suffered to fall into the hands of the
French, or even become subject to their influence, without endangering
one of the chief sources of the wealth and prosperity of this country.
It seems Malta was the enchanted island, into which Buonaparte was to
convey himself by stealth, and thence passing easily into Egypt was, at
another vast stride, to come down _souse_ upon our possessions in India.
With these resting-places, and the help of the thousand-league boots
which our imagination had lent him, the political magician was to take
but a hop, step and a jump, from one hemisphere into the other. Or, in
the language of the day, Malta was the key to Egypt, and Egypt was the
key to our Eastern conquests. Both the points assumed in this statement
were directly denied, and their fallacy exposed at the time by one to
whose authority or reasonings on the subject I can add nothing; but I
may be permitted to make one general remark with respect to this part of
the subject, that if the mere possibility of the loss of an object of
national aggrandisement is to be considered as a sufficient ground of
war, there never could be such a thing as peace among mankind. If one
party is to be kept in a state of perpetual alarm from a distant
apprehension of losing the superiority they possess in wealth, or
luxury, or power, and the other to be perpetually goaded on by the hope
of speculative plunder; if one party is determined to forgo nothing, and
the other to grasp at everything; if future causes of contention are to
be anticipated, and we are to fight now to defend an object that may
never come into dispute hereafter; if we are not to wait till we see and
feel our danger, but to create it out of every fantastic occasion; if
our selfishness must be of that refined calculating comprehensive kind
as to overlook no possibility of danger or advantage however remote or
uncertain, and at the same time so inflexibly disinterested as to think
no sacrifices too great in pursuit of its favourite object—it is easy to
see that the world would soon be dispeopled. It is well for mankind that
our passions naturally circumscribe themselves, and contain their own
antidote within them. The only excuse for our narrow, selfish passions
is their short-sightedness: were it not for this, the jealousies of
individuals and of nations would never leave them a moment’s interval of
rest or quiet. It is well that the headlong passions which make us rush
on our own destruction and that of others are only excited by gross,
palpable objects; and are therefore transient and limited in their
operation. It is well that those motives which owe nothing to reason in
their birth should not afterwards receive either nourishment or support
from it. If in their present desultory state they produce so many
mischiefs, what would be the case if they were to be organized into
systems, and under the direction of pure abstract reason? Any object
that provoked a momentary resentment or excited our jealousy might
plunge us into a war that could only be expiated by seas of blood. But
in a war of mere interest or passion, it is surely allowable to sit down
and count the cost, and to strive to moderate our pride and resentment
instead of inflaming them. Virtue, truth, and patriotism require nothing
of us but an inviolable resolution and integrity in the defence of those
rights which are the common privilege of humanity; the rest is a
calculation of prudence, not a stern command of duty that admits neither
of compromise or delay. To defend at the point of the sword, and at the
risk of every thing valuable, our title to the possessions that are
neither necessary nor durable in their own nature, that are never worth
a hundred years’ purchase, that may crumble to pieces of their own
accord, or slip out of our hands in various ways before the end of the
contest, and which afterwards will be no more secure ‘against infection
and the hand of war,’ against the insidious or desperate designs of the
enemy, against the breath of accident or unforeseen decay than they were
before—is madness and folly. It is to defeat the intended favours of
Fortune, by paying for them before-hand a price much greater than they
can ever be worth. It is to squander away the whole estate of our
present happiness and comfort in purchasing security for that, for which
no security ever was or can be given—the continued smiles of fortune. We
cannot without a presumption that will involve its own punishment think
of placing beyond the reach of chance or fate that which by its own
nature and the fluctuation of human affairs is liable to change.
But this must be the case with all distant and maritime possessions:
indeed all naval superiority is attended with this necessary
disadvantage; that, though actual power, it is not self-dependent, or
the source of its own permanence. We cannot secure the possession of the
sea in the same manner by taking ships as we can the possession of the
land by taking fortresses and countries. The longer a successful
continental warfare is carried on, the more able is the conqueror to
carry it on: every new conquest that he makes furnishes him with the
means of making more, and secures to him what he has already gained by
striking at the heart of power, by disarming resistance, and by very
liberally rewarding the expence and trouble of keeping it—Whereas the
advantages that are gained at sea are, like that element itself,
infinitely treacherous and uncertain. We may take their ships; but this
will not hinder them from building others. We cannot build forts or
erect passes on the seas, or dig them into trenches to keep out the
enemy. We cannot enter their country and cut down their forests; we
cannot enter their ports and destroy their magazines;—all their means
and sources of power remain untouched. We cannot prevent their
exertions, though we may constantly render them abortive. Thus, while at
an enormous expence we maintain our actual superiority, we make no
advances to our object—which is security; but are rather further from
it. If we ever make peace, which I suppose will happen sooner or later,
we shall find that we have not in any one respect lessened the means or
palsied the energies of our rivals; and while we remain at war we are
teaching them two very dangerous things, resolution and skill. I
conceive no power can be long superior to the attacks of another, unless
where it has the means of crushing its resistance in embryo. Naval
dominion is in this respect what a government would be that should give
to insurgents a free communication with each other, full liberty of
forming plans and of organizing themselves into regular bodies of
troops, and the privilege of never being attacked till they themselves
gave the signal for the onset. Military conquests are therefore in their
nature to a certain degree secure; because in maintaining them we have
to contend with those whom we have bound hand and foot, from whom we
have taken all effectual power of resistance; while in maintaining our
naval superiority, we strengthen our adversary by struggling with him,
since he has the full use of every limb and muscle, has every inducement
as well as opportunity to exert himself to the utmost, and is in no
danger of receiving any material hurt; at least this must be the
consequence where our natural strength and advantages are at all equal.
I know nothing but some such reasoning as this on the inefficiency of
naval advantages, as a means of reducing the enemy to terms of
submission, that could form the least excuse for the late ministers in
their desperate attempt to turn the course of the war from a channel in
which it was sure to be successful, into one in which it was sure to be
disastrous; to throw the game knowingly and wilfully into the enemy’s
hands, and ruin us in our allies. They seemed to anticipate with fatal
apprehension the most splendid success that ever adorned the annals of
the British navy, and to be determined by an inverted ambition to match
it with a pattern, in their own style, of equal horror, discomfiture,
and dismay. They seemed to conspire maliciously with fortune, in
depriving Englishmen of the pure, unalloyed triumph of that day.—For the
present, the errors of the cabinet have entirely defeated whatever
advantages we might have derived from our naval success; and the effect
of our mistaken policy has been, that while we remain undisputed masters
of the seas, and are grasping at the commerce of the world, we see the
ports of Europe about to be shut against us. War on the continent is
therefore hopeless; war at sea useless, or worse than useless: for
methinks there is neither policy nor wisdom nor humanity ‘in resolving
to set no limits to your hostility but with your existence,’ when you
have to contend with a great and formidable foe; when you only know that
_he_ is safe from your attacks; when you can only distress him, when you
gain no advantage yourself in the mean time, and cannot possibly gain
any that can be put in competition with such an alternative; when we
consider that such a resolution (however heroically it may be formed)
cannot be always persisted in (for the desire of peace is natural, and
war revolting to the human mind); that the longer it is adhered to, the
more mischievous it will become, and the more dangerous in its
consequences afterwards, and will render the diminution of that maritime
preponderance, which we have held with such a convulsive grasp, more and
more an object both of policy and revenge to other powers.
I have promised to say something of the justice of the war in its
principle, not as a war of defence but as a war of interference; though
I think the less is said on this subject the better; it can only open
‘another Iliad of woes.’ It must lead to a train of recollections that
can be of no use to us at present; or revive sentiments and a spirit
that should be recalled only (if it were possible) to be disclaimed. The
less we retain of a spirit of offence, and the sooner we forget
ourselves in the character of aggressors, in however just a cause, the
better shall we be qualified for our present posture of defence: for
there is no ground of resistance so sure as a determined belief, for the
time at least, that all aggression must be wrong. I am far from thinking
that the arbitrary conduct of a government, even where it does not
affect ourselves, is not a just ground of war, or that the conduct of
the French government was not marked by a spirit of violent and unjust
ambition. Of course if that spirit can be resisted with effect, there is
no injustice, and there is a great deal of policy in doing it. But
before we can plead generous indignation and an uncontrolable love of
justice in excuse for our rashness and imprudence, it must be clear that
pride, revenge, and the lust of dominion have had no share in producing
this ardent concern for the rights and liberties of mankind. It is not
the nature or justice of the occasion, but the use intended to be made
of it; the principles and views on which we act, and the character of
those with whom we are associated in a common cause, that gives us a
right to arrogate to ourselves the title of assertors of the liberties
of mankind. If, however, our motives are not such as to be above all
suspicion, it is not enough that we are able to hide them from
ourselves, unless we can at the same time impose upon those who have not
the same interest in being deceived by the thin disguise that covers
them. Instead then of enquiring into the abstract justice of the war (a
sort of enquiry now very nearly exploded, and which would be of little
use in guiding our practical conclusions), let us examine in what manner
our remonstrances would be likely to be received by the government to
whom they were addressed, and how far the common feelings of humanity
would compel them ‘to bow their crested pride’ at the feet of their
accusers. Would they forget then that the undue and dangerous influence
in the affairs of Europe, which was so loudly complained of, had been
the consequence of the combined efforts of all Europe to accomplish
their destruction, and was so far from being the cause of the hostility
of other states, that it was their only security against it? That their
unjust and tyrannical encroachments on the independence of the
neighbouring states had been made in defending their own independence
from the aggressions of which they were made the instruments? They would
say, that to think of restoring the independence of those countries
would be putting into the hands of a mortal enemy, whom you have just
disarmed, the weapons with which he may most surely effect your
destruction; that whatever advantages they had gained had been bought
with their blood, shed for their country; that if there had been any
instance of unjust aggression, or inordinate ambition, it might at least
be _accounted for_ from that natural jealousy of others, and that fierce
impatience of control, that must become habitual to those who had had
every kind of difficulty to encounter, and who had triumphed over all
opposition. The gigantic strength and towering greatness of France had
arisen from her convulsive struggles for existence, and in the cause of
that liberty which was denied her. They, who had insulted her weakness
and blasted her hopes, had no right to complain of her strength or her
despair. Those who had not been able to make their country free and
happy, would be instigated by a just revenge to make her great and
formidable to her enemies. They might say, ‘You left us no choice
between the highest point of glory, and the most abject submission; we
must either be conquerors or slaves. If you gained an advantage, you
pursued it; if you were defeated, you returned to the charge; neither
success nor misfortune inclined you to listen to terms of accommodation:
we saw that we could never hope for peace, but either by giving to
France such an ascendancy as would overawe the rest of Europe, or by
throwing ourselves at last on the mercy of our unrelenting foe. We had
not forgotten the partition of Poland, the massacres of Ismael and
Warsaw; and we could not satisfy ourselves but that those who had had
the chief concern in these events, or had witnessed them without dismay,
might have other objects in view in entering France, besides the
tranquillity of the people, the restoration of order, or a disinterested
regard for the safety of thrones, and the independence of Europe. We
could not conceive that an implacable enmity to France was a full
atonement for all other crimes, or a security for every virtue. Pursued,
hunted down, driven to madness, we turned upon our pursuers, and
trampled them under our feet; and in the career of our fury, and the
plenitude of our triumph, you charge us with excesses, from which we
ourselves were the greatest sufferers; and with not having observed
those rules of justice and moderation, which reason required of us. We
were to have no indemnity, no security: we were to give back every
conquest, as soon as made; to fight every battle over again; to rely
solely on the faith or generosity of our adversaries, as a pledge that
no advantage would be taken of our confidence; or, if it were ten times
betrayed, we were not to complain, as we had no right to advantages
obtained by unjust violence, in a cause that exposed us to the enmity
and detestation of the human race: we were to plead guilty to our own
condemnation; to set the seal on our own infamy, and to receive as a
mark of favour and lenity, whatever implied our admission into the
common rank and privileges of mankind; and, after endless sacrifices and
exertions, we were only to prepare for new struggles and insults,
without ever hoping to end them. But from whom were we to learn this
extreme moderation, or that respect for the rights of justice or the
ties of humanity, which could be no defence to us? Why were we not to
pursue the objects of our ambition, with the same obstinacy as those
with whom we had to contend pursued the objects of their revenge? It
could hardly be expected that all the concessions were to be made by
those who were intoxicated with the pride of victory, in favour of those
who had reaped nothing but disappointment, and who were only urged on by
a sullen despair. In this manner was the war protracted, year after
year, by open hostility, by civil dissentions, and pretended treaties;
lingered out under various pretexts, which were artfully substituted for
each other as occasion required, so as to make it impossible ever to
arrive at any decisive issue to the contest. When defeated, the
continuance of the war was necessary to their own defence and safety;
when flushed with victory for a time, then nothing less than full
indemnity for the past, as well as security for the future would satisfy
them; and then their favourite object, the subjugation of France, and
destruction of the republic, was resumed with fresh ardour, and tempted
them on till their hopes again ended in defeat and ruin: thus adapting
every aspect of affairs to their own purposes, they constantly returned
in the same circle to the point from which they set out, and war was
always necessary, peace always unattainable. Or if at any time the
fainting resolution and exhausted strength of our adversaries seemed to
promise us that repose which was so necessary to us, we saw the dying
embers of war again eagerly rekindled by a country that, standing aloof
from the contagion, shouted from her rocky shores to see the flames that
consumed the vitals of Europe. The bitterest enmity that our early
struggles in the cause of liberty had drawn down upon us was to be shewn
by a people “that had long insulted the slavery of Europe, by the
loudness of its boasts of freedom.” English solicitation and English
gold were always ready to defeat that object, which was to be the reward
of so many triumphs, and of so many years of suffering, of havoc,
uncertainty, and dismay. A reluctant peace was at length extorted from
her: but her jealousy, avarice, and pride made her choose to risk every
thing rather than remain in a state so unnatural to her. Delicate in her
moral sentiments, disinterested in all her proceedings, she was shocked
at some violences of ours, which permitted her no longer to remain an
indifferent spectator of the calamities of other nations, and she sought
the first opportunity of evading the treaty that had been concluded, by
alarming the fears of her merchants for the safety of their Eastern
possessions. She lost no time in rousing to her aid her former
confederates in wrong. By her incantations, the hydra-headed monster,
which we thought we had finally subdued, again feels new life and vigour
restored to it, unites its severed folds, and with its triple crown
moves onward to its prey, and France must submit or perish, that England
may preserve her commerce.’ In some such manner as this would a
Frenchman repel the charges brought against his countrymen; and, if we
allow for the strength of national prejudices, there appears to be some
appearance of reason in what he says.[1] If the present quarrel had been
so managed as to have been completely disentangled from the former one,
we should have been better able to answer their reproaches, and I think
to resist their menaces. Had not Austria been precipitated unwisely into
that quarrel in the manner she was, she could not have fallen to the
ground without a struggle.
In what further remarks I have to make, I shall consider whether the
system of internal policy pursued by the late minister was in its
general tendency likely to increase the spirit of independence, and
consequently the security of the country. It seems to me a desirable
object to refer as much as possible of our proceedings both at home and
abroad to the influence of that minister’s character on the national
feelings, and to the blind confidence generally placed in his talents
and integrity. The errors that we have been led into by a confidence of
this sort will be sooner retrieved than if they proceeded from a change
in our own habits and dispositions. It is well if we can save the credit
of our national character, a little at the expence of our
understandings; for I cannot think that our confidence in that minister
was well bestowed. I know it is a general maxim, that we are not to war
with the dead. We ought not, indeed, to trample on their bodies; but
with their _minds_ we may and must make war, unless we would be governed
by them after they are dead. They who wish their sentiments to survive
them in the memories of men, must also expect to live in their censures.
The character of Mr. Pitt was, perhaps, one of the most singular that
ever existed. With few talents, and fewer virtues, he acquired and
preserved in one of the most trying situations, and in spite of all
opposition, the highest reputation for the possession of every moral
excellence, and as having carried the attainments of eloquence and
wisdom as far as human abilities could go. This he did (strange as it
appears) by a negation (together with the common virtues) of the common
vices of human nature, and by the complete negation of every other
talent that might interfere with the only one which he possessed in a
supreme degree, and which indeed may be made to include the appearance
of all others—an artful use of words, and a certain dexterity of logical
arrangement. In these alone his power consisted; and the defect of all
other qualities, which usually constitute greatness, contributed to the
more complete success of these. Having no strong feelings, no distinct
perceptions, his mind having no link, as it were, to connect it with the
world of external nature, every subject presented to him nothing more
than a _tabula rasa_, on which he was at liberty to lay whatever
colouring of language he pleased; having no general principles, no
comprehensive views of things, no moral habits of thinking, no system of
action, there was nothing to hinder him from pursuing any particular
purpose by any means that offered; having never any plan, he could not
be convicted of inconsistency, and his own pride and obstinacy were the
only rules of his conduct. Having no insight into human nature, no
sympathy with the passions of men, or apprehension of their real
designs, he seemed perfectly insensible to the consequences of things,
and would believe nothing till it actually happened. The fog and haze in
which he saw every thing communicated itself to others, and the total
indistinctness and uncertainty of his own ideas tended to confound the
perceptions of his hearers more effectually than the most ingenious
misrepresentation could have done. Indeed, in defending his conduct he
never seemed to consider himself as at all responsible for the success
of his measures, or that future events were in our own power; but that
as the best laid schemes might fail, and there was no providing against
all possible contingencies, this was a sufficient excuse for our
plunging at once into any dangerous or absurd enterprise without the
least regard to consequences. His reserved logic confined itself solely
to the _possible_ and the _impossible_, and he appeared to regard the
_probable_ and _improbable_, the only foundation of moral prudence or
political wisdom, as beneath the notice of a profound statesman; as if
the pride of the human intellect were concerned in never entrusting
itself with subjects, where it may be compelled to acknowledge its
weakness.[2] From his manner of reasoning, he seemed not to have
believed that the truth of his statements depended on the reality of the
facts, but that the things depended on the order in which he arranged
them in words: you would not suppose him to be agitating a serious
question, which had real grounds to go upon, but to be declaiming upon
an imaginary thesis, proposed as an exercise in the schools. He never
set himself to examine the force of the objections that were brought
against his measures, or attempted to establish them upon clear, solid
grounds of his own; but constantly contented himself with first gravely
stating the logical form, or dilemma to which the question reduced
itself, and then, after having declared his opinion, proceeded to amuse
his hearers by a series of rhetorical common-places, connected together
in grave, sonorous, and elaborately constructed periods, without ever
shewing their real application to the subject in dispute. Thus if any
member of the opposition disapproved of any measure, and enforced his
objections by pointing out the many evils with which it is fraught, or
the difficulties attending its execution, his only answer was, ‘that it
was true there might be inconveniences attending the measure proposed,
but we were to remember, that every expedient that could be devised
might be said to be nothing more than a choice of difficulties, and that
all that human prudence could do was to consider on which side the
advantages lay; that for his part he conceived that the present measure
was attended with more advantages and fewer disadvantages than any other
that could be adopted; that if we were diverted from our object by every
appearance of difficulty, the wheels of government would be clogged by
endless delays and imaginary grievances; that most of the objections
made to the measure appeared to him trivial, others of them unfounded
and improbable; or that if a scheme free from all these objections could
be proposed, it might after all prove inefficient; while, in the mean
time, a material object remained unprovided for, or the opportunity of
action was lost.’ This mode of reasoning is admirably described by
Hobbes, in speaking of the writings of some of the Schoolmen, of whom he
says, that ‘they had learned the trick of imposing what they list upon
their readers, and declining the force of true reason by verbal forks,
that is distinctions which signify nothing, but serve only to astonish
the multitude of ignorant men.’ That what I have here stated comprehends
the whole force of his mind, which consisted solely in this evasive
dexterity and perplexing formality, assisted by a copiousness of words
and common-place topics, will, I think, be evident to any one who
carefully looks over his speeches, undazzled by the reputation or
personal influence of the speaker. It will be in vain to look in them
for any of the common proofs of human genius or wisdom. He has not left
behind him a single memorable saying—not one profound maxim—one solid
observation—one forcible description—one beautiful thought—one humourous
picture—one affecting sentiment. He has made no addition whatever to the
stock of human knowledge. He did not possess any one of those faculties
which contribute to the instruction and delight of mankind—depth of
understanding, imagination, sensibility, wit, vivacity, clear and solid
judgment. But it may be asked, If these qualities are not to be found in
him, where are we to look for them? And I may be required to point out
instances of them. I shall answer then, that he had none of the
profound, legislative wisdom, piercing sagacity, or rich, impetuous,
high-wrought imagination of Burke; the manly eloquence, strong sense,
exact knowledge, vehemence and natural simplicity of Fox; the ease,
brilliancy, and acuteness of Sheridan. It is not merely that he had not
all these qualities in the degree that they were severally possessed by
his rivals, but he had not any of them in any degree. His reasoning is a
technical arrangement of unmeaning common-places, his eloquence merely
rhetorical, his style monotonous and artificial. If he could pretend to
any one excellence in an eminent degree, it was to taste in composition.
There is certainly nothing low, nothing puerile, nothing far-fetched or
abrupt in his speeches; there is a kind of faultless regularity
pervading them throughout; but in the confined, mechanical, passive mode
of eloquence which he adopted, it seemed rather more difficult to commit
errors than to avoid them. A man who is determined never to move out of
the beaten road cannot lose his way. However, habit, joined to the
peculiar mechanical memory which he possessed, carried his correctness
to a degree which, in an extemporaneous speaker, was almost miraculous;
he perhaps hardly ever uttered a sentence that was not perfectly regular
and connected. In this respect, he not only had the advantage over his
own contemporaries, but perhaps no one that ever lived equalled him in
this singular faculty. But for this, he would always have passed for a
common man; and to this the constant sameness, and, if I may say so,
vulgarity of his ideas must have contributed not a little, as there was
nothing to distract his mind from this one object of his unintermitted
attention; and as even in his choice of words he never aimed at anything
more than a certain general propriety and stately uniformity of style.
His talents were exactly fitted for the situation in which he was
placed; where it was his business not to overcome others, but to avoid
being overcome. He was able to baffle opposition, not from strength or
firmness, but from the evasive ambiguity and impalpable nature of his
resistance, which gave no hold to the rude grasp of his opponents: no
force could bind the loose phantom, and his mind (though ‘not matchless,
and his pride humbled by such rebuke,’) soon rose from defeat unhurt,
‘And in its liquid texture mortal wound
Receiv’d no more than can the fluid air.’[3]
By this lucky combination of strength and weakness, he succeeded in
maintaining an undiminished influence over the opinions of his own
country for a number of years, in wielding her energies as he pleased,
and guiding the counsels of almost all Europe. With respect to his
influence on the continent, that is an illusion that is past, and not
worth inquiring about; but it may still be of some use to inquire by
what means he strengthened his influence at home, as this may more
immediately concern our future conduct. This I think he effected in two
ways: by lessening the free spirit of the country as much as he could,
and by giving every possible encouragement to its commercial spirit. I
shall not here examine how far both these designs were wise and salutary
at the time; but I conceive that neither a spirit of dependence nor an
unbounded and universal spirit of trade will be the best security for
our safety at present. An indifference to liberty is not likely to
increase the love of independence; nor is an exclusive regard to private
gain likely to produce a disinterested concern for the public welfare.
Mr. Pitt, in making war, always considered peace as an object perfectly
indifferent in itself; and, in securing the prerogative of the crown,
seemed to think that the privileges of the people did not deserve a
moment’s attention. I do not in this mean to condemn his conduct:
perhaps we may suppose that the restrictions which he introduced on the
liberty of the subject, and the spirit of passive obedience and
non-resistance which was every where industriously diffused, the
contempt and obloquy which were poured on the very name of liberty,
might be required by the circumstances of the time, and necessary to
prevent the contagion of a dangerous example, and the mischiefs of civil
anarchy and confusion. The public were perhaps justly surfeited with
metaphysical treatises overturning the foundation of all civil rights,
and the very notion of liberty, with historical disquisitions proving
that the popular spirit of political institutions was the bane of all
internal quiet and happiness, the source of endless violence and
bloodshed, and the final cause of their dissolution; that human
happiness could never reach its utmost point of perfection but under the
mild and tranquil reign of universal despotism; that the forms of all
governments were alike indifferent, provided they secured the same
servile obedience and death-like apathy in the state. Perhaps it was
then necessary that we should be told, _ex cathedrâ_, that the people
had nothing to do with the laws but to _obey_ them: perhaps it was right
that we should be amused with apologies for the corrupt influence of the
crown; that integrity, honour, the love of justice, public spirit, or a
zeal for the interests of the community should be laughed at as absurd
chimeras, and that an ardent love of liberty, or determined resistance
to powerful oppression should be treated as madness and folly. But
however wise or necessary a temporary fashion of this kind might be to
counteract the poison of other views and sentiments, I am sure it can
neither be wise nor safe to continue it at present. We ought to do every
thing in our power to get rid of the effects of so dangerous a habit as
soon as possible. The fewer curbs there are on the spirit of the people,
the more vigorous and determined will it shew itself; the greater the
encouragement that is given to the principles of liberty, and the
greater confidence that is placed in the general disposition of the
country, the greater and more irresistible will be their habitual
attachment to liberty and independence. You give a manifest advantage to
an enemy if you in any way lessen the sources of enthusiasm, or in any
way check the ardour, confine the energy, degrade the sentiments, or
discountenance the erect, manly, independent spirit of your country. It
is dangerous to let any thing fall into disrepute or contempt which may
serve as a watchword to startle the dull ear, or rouse the frozen blood;
but to this purpose it is not enough that the name is retained, if the
habitual feeling is destroyed. A tame acquiescence in every encroachment
of power or exertion of undue influence, a disposition to assert our own
rights or those of others no further than fear or interest permit, a
habit of looking on the welfare of our country or the rights of mankind
as secondary considerations, no further to be regarded than as they are
connected with our own danger or convenience, these are not the symptoms
of the durable greatness and independence of a people. The causes of the
ruin of states have been almost always laid in the relaxation of their
moral habits and political prejudices. No kingdom can be secure in its
independence against a greater power that is not free in its spirit, as
well as in its institutions. I shall be happy if I have been mistaken in
thinking these observations at all applicable to our own country: but
the observations themselves are serious, and worth attending to. They
are such as have been recognised in all nations and ages, except those
indeed where their having been so would have rendered them suspected.
On the other hand, a commercial spirit is a very weak as well as
dangerous substitute for a spirit of freedom: a sense of self-interest,
of mere mercenary advantage, can but ill supply the place of principle.
The love of gain, however active or persevering this principle may be in
accomplishing its own particular ends, can never be safely trusted to as
an _ally_ in a cause where there are other objects to be attended to.
Men who are actuated by this sole principle will very obstinately, no
doubt, defend their wealth, while they can retain it; but when that is
no longer the case, they will think nothing else worth retaining, and
meanly compromise their independence for their safety. That common
birthright which they receive from nature, in which every Englishman has
an equal interest as such, appears of little value in their eyes.
Liberty is in their eyes a coarse homely figure, but for the jewels that
sparkle in her hair, and the rings on her fingers. It is inconceivable
to them how a man can have any attachment to a simple shed, or can take
any pride in his title to that respect, which is due to him only because
he feels himself to be free. They will defend England as connected with
her colonies, with her proud canopies of Eastern state, her distant
spicy groves and the rich spoils of her Western isles; but will they
defend her as she is England, as their country? Strip her of her
conquests, her slaves, and her plantations, her bales of goods, her gold
and silver, and leave her only herself, what would there be in all the
rest worth the labour of a struggle? Her barren acres, her brave,
simple, generous, honest-hearted, hardy race of men, her liberty, her
fame, her integrity they look upon with the most sovereign contempt and
indifference, and would be ready to sacrifice them all for the purchase
of some new golden settlement, ‘some happier island in the watery waste—
‘Where slaves no more their native land behold,
But fiends torment, and Christians thirst for gold.’
They would defend their country not as her children, but as her masters;
as a property, not as a state. There may be the same pride and luxury in
other classes of men, but they are accompanied with other feelings, and
drawn from other sources. It has been a customary compliment to consider
those as best entitled to come forward conspicuously in defence of their
country who had what is called the greatest _stake_ in it. This is
perhaps true of the real, old hereditary nobility and gentry, of those
who find their names enrolled high in the annals of their country, whose
affections have grown to her soil as it were in a long course of
centuries, who have an interest in looking forward to posterity, and a
pride in looking back upon their ancestors, who have not only present
possessions and advantages to defend, but feelings of inveterate
prejudice and inbred honour to defend them. The loss of respect, or of
their former privileges, is a change which to them appears like
something out of the course of nature, to which no force or accidental
circumstances can ever reconcile them. They are also men of liberal
education; and this is a great point gained. There is certainly this
advantage in a classical education, if not counteracted by other causes,
that it gives men long views; it accustoms the mind to take an interest
in things foreign to itself, to love virtue for its own sake, to prefer
fame to life, and glory to riches, and to fix our thoughts on the great
and permanent instead of narrow and selfish objects. It teaches us to
believe that there is something really great and excellent in the world,
surviving all the shocks of accident and fluctuations of opinion, and to
feel respect for that which is made venerable by its nature and
antiquity instead of that low and servile dread which bows only to
present power and upstart authority. It is hard to find in minds
otherwise formed either a delicate sense of honour, or an inflexible
regard to truth and justice. But the spirit of trade is the very reverse
of all this. It is the principle of this set of men to cry ‘Long life to
the conqueror,’ to feel a contempt for all obligations that are not
founded in self-interest, and to consider all generous pursuits and the
hope of unfading renown as romance and folly. ‘Virtue is not their
habit, they are out of themselves in any course of conduct recommended
only by conscience and glory.’ They would not give a hundred hogsheads
of sugar or a half-year’s income for all the posthumous fame that was
ever acquired in the world. If things should unhappily ever come to
extremities, they are not the people who will retrieve them, either by
their exertions or example. They have neither grand and elevated views,
nor the warm, genuine feelings of nature. They have no _principles_ of
action. Irresolute, temporizing, every thing is with them made a subject
of selfish calculation. Their friendships as well as their enmities are
the creatures of the occasion. Confident, insolent in the day of
success, and while their cause is triumphant, they are as soon dejected
and driven to despair, when they find the tide turned against them.
Fortune is with them the first of goddesses: success the only title to
authority and respect; and possession the truest right. Accustomed to
all the fluctuations of hope and fear, they consider nothing stable in
human affairs; thrown into the possession of power and affluence by
accidents which they know not how to account for, it can hardly seem
strange to them that they should again be stripped of them. They do not
‘lay the fault upon themselves but on their stars, that they are
underlings.’ If I hear a man say that we are to give up our public
principles whenever circumstances render it necessary, that we are to
inquire upon all occasions not what is right, but what is prudent to be
done, that those feelings, which lead us to adhere to the cause of truth
and justice if at all unpopular, or to incur any personal risk or
inconvenience in defending what is right, are weak and vulgar
prejudices, I know that that man will be first to truckle to an enemy,
and the last voluntarily to risk his life in defence of his
independence.
The courage of the soldier and the citizen are essentially different.
The one is momentary and involuntary; the other permanent and voluntary.
It is one thing to do all in your power to repel danger when it is
unavoidable, and another to expose yourself to it when you may avoid
going into it. Fear, or rashness, or necessity may be supposed to kindle
all the fury of battle: but principle alone can make us willing to
return to the charge after defeat. It is for this _re-action_ that we
ought to be chiefly prepared. For this nothing can prepare us but a true
love of our country, not taken up as a fashion, but felt as a duty; a
spirit of resistance not measured by our convenience, but by the
strength of our attachment and the real value of the object; but steady
enthusiasm; but a determination never to submit while hope or life
remained, and an indifference to every thing else but that one great
object.
What resistance has Holland ever made to the power of France from the
first moment? Commerce had spread its sordid mantle completely over her.
Wrapped closely up in this, she fell without resistance and without a
groan: she was not of a temper to fall in love with danger, to court
disasters. Since that time she has not made a struggle or breathed a
sigh for her release, but lies supine, secure, unmoved, and torpid,
‘Dull as her lakes that slumber in the storm.’
Two hundred years of commerce and riches, which had gone over her,
since, in that noble struggle for thirty years together, she had defied
the whole power and the utmost vengeance of Spain, had prepared her for
this striking change. But England is not yet quite commercial: the
spirit of trade has not spread its poison through the whole mass of our
blood and vital juices! As I do not wish that England (with all her high
hopes, and called to a far different destiny) may _ever_ share the fate
of Holland, I do not wish that she may ever resemble her in herself;
that every other feeling should give way to that of interest alone, but
that she may tremble at ever realizing the warning picture of the poet,
——‘When, stript of all her charms,
The land of scholars, and the nurse of arms,
Where noble stems transmit the patriot flame,
Where kings have toil’d and poets wrote for fame,
One sink of level avarice shall lie,
And scholars, soldiers, kings, unhonour’d die.’
Though a state cannot look to its commerce for its security, it may be
involved in endless difficulty and danger by the views of commercial
aggrandizement. The views of men wholly engrossed in such pursuits are
altogether low and mechanical. If they see far, it is always in a
straight line before them; their sagacity is confined to what
immediately concerns their own interest. They are so intent upon that
one object that they overlook every thing else; and their eagerness to
accumulate is such, that they would rather hazard all than relinquish a
pursuit which promises them some new acquisition. While they are
successful, it is impossible to persuade them that they ever can be
otherwise, or to restrain their rashness by any considerations of
prudence or humanity. Actuated only by gross, palpable objects, and full
of themselves, they laugh at all distant danger. All general reasonings
on the principles of human nature, or the operation of causes by which
they do not find themselves influenced, appear to them perfectly futile
and visionary. ‘They think there is nothing real but that which they can
handle; which they can measure with a two-foot rule, which they can tell
upon ten fingers.’ As they believe money to be the only substantial
good, they are also persuaded that it is the only instrument of power.
With this they think themselves invulnerable, and that the more of it
they have, the more secure they are. As long as their credit remains
unimpaired, and their remittances are regularly made, they consider the
fate of battles and the intrigues of cabinets as of very little
comparative importance. They look up with more awe and admiration to a
stock-jobbing broker surrounded with his clerks than they do to a
victorious general at the head of his army. The rise and fall of stocks,
and the demand for our manufactures abroad, are in their opinion the
only criterions of national prosperity. On the other hand, whatever
affects their own interest, the loss of an island, or the stopping up of
a port, is found immediately to threaten the ruin of the country. Their
fears are as rash and groundless as their confidence. Every thing in
which they themselves are concerned is viewed through a magnifying
medium, and demands all our vigilance and attention, while every thing
else dwindles into insignificance. I therefore think there ought to be
as little connection as possible between the measures of government and
the maxims of the Exchange, and that the interests of a great empire
ought not to be managed by a company of factors.
I have thus expressed the sentiments which occurred to me on the present
situation of our affairs, and some of the steps which led to it. I have
done this as freely and unreservedly as I could, because if they are
wrong, it is not likely that they will be much attended to; but if they
are right, they may be of some use. And I conceive that even they who
may think the view I have taken of the measures of the last
administration, and the application of particular observations to our
own conduct altogether unfounded, will not deny the truth of the general
principles on which they are built. Or that the sentiments of justice,
of honour, of reason and liberty, by which I think our views and conduct
_ought_ to have been regulated, can be too deeply impressed on our
minds.
End of FREE THOUGHTS ON PUBLIC AFFAIRS
POLITICAL ESSAYS,
WITH
SKETCHES OF PUBLIC CHARACTERS
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
This work was published in 1819 with the following
title-page:—‘Political Essays, with Sketches of Public Characters. By
William Hazlitt. “Come, draw the curtain, shew the picture.” London:
Printed for William Hone, 45, Ludgate Hill. 1819.’ A ‘Second edition,’
with the same title and motto, ‘published by John Templeman, 39,
Tottenham-Court-Road; and Simpkin and Marshall, Stationers’-court,’
appeared in 1822, but was probably a mere re-issue. The text of the 1819
edition is here reprinted.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PAGE
Dedication 29
Preface 31
The Marquis Wellesley 47
Mr. Southey, Poet Laureat 48
Mr. Southey’s New Year’s Ode 49
Dottrel-catching 51
The Bourbons and Buonaparte 52
Vetus 57
On the Courier and Times Newspapers 58
Illustrations of Vetus 63
On the late War 96
Prince Maurice’s Parrot 101
Whether the Friends of Freedom can entertain any sanguine hopes of
the Favorable Results of the ensuing Congress 103
The Lay of the Laureate 109
Mr. Owen’s ‘New View of Society,’ &c. 121
Speeches of Charles C. Western, Esq. M.P. and Henry Brougham, Esq.
M.P. 127
Mr. Coleridge’s Lay Sermon 138
—— —— Statesman’s Manual 143
—— —— Lay Sermon 152
Buonaparte and Muller 154
Illustrations of the Times Newspaper 155
Mr. Macirone’s ‘Interesting Facts relating to the Fall and Death
of Joachim Murat, King of Naples’ 177
Wat Tyler and the Quarterly Review 192
The Courier and Wat Tyler 200
Mr. Southey’s Letter to William Smith, Esq. 210
On the Spy-System 232
On the same subject 234
On the Treatment of the State Prisoners 238
The Opposition and the Courier 240
England in 1798, by S. T. Coleridge 241
On the Effects of War and Taxes 243
Character of Mr. Burke 250
On Court Influence 254
On the Clerical Character 266
What is the People? 283
On the Regal Character 305
‘The Fudge Family in Paris’ 311
Character of Lord Chatham 321
—— of Mr. Burke 325
—— of Mr. Fox 337
—— of Mr. Pitt 346
‘Pitt and Buonaparte’ 350
An Examination of Mr. Malthus’s Doctrines 356
On the Originality of Mr. Malthus’s Essay 361
On the Principles of Population as affecting the Schemes of
Utopian Improvement 367
On the Application of Mr. Malthus’s Principle to the Poor Laws 374
Queries relating to the Essay on Population 381
To JOHN HUNT, Esq.
_The tried, steady, zealous, and conscientious advocate of the liberty
of his country, and the rights of mankind;_—
_One of those few persons who are what they would be thought to be;
sincere without offence, firm but temperate; uniting private worth to
public principle; a friend in need, a patriot without an eye to himself;
who never betrayed an individual or a cause he pretended to serve—in
short, that rare character, a man of common sense and common honesty,_
_This volume is respectfully and gratefully inscribed by_
THE AUTHOR.
PREFACE
I am no politician, and still less can I be said to be a party-man: but
I have a hatred of tyranny, and a contempt for its tools; and this
feeling I have expressed as often and as strongly as I could. I cannot
sit quietly down under the claims of barefaced power, and I have tried
to expose the little arts of sophistry by which they are defended. I
have no mind to have my person made a property of, nor my understanding
made a dupe of. I deny that liberty and slavery are convertible terms,
that right and wrong, truth and falsehood, plenty and famine, the
comforts or wretchedness of a people, are matters of perfect
indifference. That is all I know of the matter; but on these points I am
likely to remain incorrigible, in spite of any arguments that I have
seen used to the contrary. It needs no sagacity to discover that two and
two make four; but to persist in maintaining this obvious position, if
all the fashion, authority, hypocrisy, and venality of mankind were
arrayed against it, would require a considerable effort of personal
courage, and would soon leave a man in a very formidable minority.
Again, I am no believer in the doctrine of _divine right_, either as it
regards the Stuarts or the Bourbons; nor can I bring myself to approve
of the enormous waste of blood and treasure wilfully incurred by a
family that supplanted the one in this country to restore the others in
France. It is to my mind a piece of sheer impudence. The question
between natural liberty and hereditary slavery, whether men are born
free or slaves, whether kings are the servants of the people, or the
people the property of kings (whatever we may think of it in the
abstract, or debate about it in the schools)—in this country, in Old
England, and under the succession of the House of Hanover, is not a
question of theory, but has been long since decided by certain facts and
feelings, to call which in question would be equally inconsistent with
proper respect to the people, or common decency towards the throne. An
English subject cannot call this principle in question without
renouncing his country; an English prince cannot call it in question
without disclaiming his title to the crown, which was placed by our
ancestors on the head of his ancestors, on no other ground and for no
other possible purpose than to vindicate this sacred principle in their
own persons, and to hold it out as an example to posterity and to the
world. An Elector of Hanover, called over here to be made king of
England, in contempt and to the exclusion of the claims of the old,
hereditary possessors and pretenders to the throne, on any other plea
except that of his being the chosen representative and appointed
guardian of the rights and liberties of the people (the consequent
pledge and guarantee of the rights and liberties of other nations) would
indeed be a solecism more absurd and contemptible than any to be found
in history. What! Send for a petty Elector of a petty foreign state to
reign over us from respect to _his_ right to the throne of these realms,
in defiance of the legitimate heir to the crown, and ‘in contempt of the
choice of the people!’ Oh monstrous fiction! Miss Flora Mac Ivor would
not have heard of such a thing: the author of Waverley has well answered
Mr. Burke’s ‘Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs.’[4] Let not our
respect for our ancestors, who fought and bled for their own freedom,
and to aid (not to stifle) the cause of freedom in other nations, suffer
us to believe this poor ideot calumny of them. Let not our shame at
having been inveigled into crusades and Holy Alliances against the
freedom of mankind, suffer us to be made the dupes of it ourselves, in
thought, in word, or deed. The question of genuine liberty or of naked
slavery, if put in words, should be answered by Englishmen with scorn:
if put in any other shape than words, it must be answered in a different
way, unless they would lose the name of Englishmen! An Englishman has no
distinguishing virtue but honesty: he has and can have no privilege or
advantage over other nations but liberty. If he is not free, he is the
worst of slaves, for he is nothing else. If he feels that he has wrongs
and dare not say so, he is the meanest of hypocrites; for it is certain
that he cannot be contented under them.—This was once a free, a proud,
and happy country, when under a constitutional monarchy and a Whig king,
it had just broken the chains of tyranny that were prepared for it, and
successfully set at defiance the menaces of an hereditary pretender;
when the monarch still felt what he owed to himself and the people, and
in the opposite claims which were set up to it, saw the real tenure on
which he held his crown; when civil and religious liberty were the
watch-words by which good men and true subjects were known to one
another, not by the cant of legitimacy; when the reigning sovereign
stood between you and the polluted touch of a bigot and a despot who
stood ready to seize upon you and yours as his lawful prey; when liberty
and loyalty went hand in hand, and the Tory principles of passive
obedience and non-resistance were more unfashionable at court than in
the country; when to uphold the authority of the throne, it was not
thought necessary to undermine the privileges or break the spirit of the
nation; when an Englishman felt that his name was another name for
independence, ‘the envy of less happier lands,’ when it was his pride to
be born, and his wish that other nations might become free; before a
sophist and an apostate had dared to tell him that he had no share, no
merit, no free agency, in the glorious Revolution of 1688, and that he
was bound to lend a helping hand to crush all others, that implied a
right in the people to chuse their own form of government; before he was
become sworn brother to the Pope, familiar to the Holy Inquisition, an
encourager of the massacres of his Protestant brethren, a patron of the
Bourbons, and jailor to the liberties of mankind! Ah, John Bull! John
Bull! thou art not what thou wert in the days of thy friend, Arbuthnot!
Thou wert an honest fellow then: now thou art turned bully and coward.
This is the only politics I know; the only patriotism I feel. The
question with me is, whether I and all mankind are born slaves or free.
That is the one thing necessary to know and to make good: the rest is
_flocci, nauci, nihili, pili_. Secure this point, and all is safe: lose
this, and all is lost. There are people who cannot understand a
principle; nor perceive how a cause can be connected with an individual,
even in spite of himself, nor how the salvation of mankind can be bound
up with the success of one man. It is in vain that I address to them
what follows.—‘One fate attends the altar and the throne.’ So sings Mr.
Southey. I say, that one fate attends the people and the assertor of the
people’s rights against those who say they have no rights, that they are
their property, their goods, their chattels, the live-stock on the
estate of Legitimacy. This is what kings at present tell us with their
swords, and poets with their pens. He who tells me this deprives me not
only of the right, but of the very heart and will to be free, takes the
breath out of the body of liberty, and leaves it a dead and helpless
corse, destroys ‘at one fell swoop’ the dearest hopes, and blasts the
fairest prospects of mankind through all ages and nations, sanctifies
slavery, binds it as a spell on the understanding, and makes freedom a
mockery, and the name a bye-word. The poor wretch immured in the
dungeons of the Inquisition may breathe a sigh to liberty, may repeat
its name, may think of it as a blessing, if not to himself, to others;
but the wretch imprisoned in the dungeon of Legitimacy, the very tomb of
freedom, that ‘painted sepulchre, white without, but full of ravening
and all uncleanness within,’ must not even think of it, must not so much
as dream of it, but as a thing forbid: it is a profanation to his lips,
an impiety to his thoughts; his very imagination is enthralled, and he
can only look forward to the never-ending flight of future years, and
see the same gloomy prospect of abject wretchedness and hopeless
desolation spread out for himself and his species. They who bow to
thrones and hate mankind may here feast their eyes with blight, mildew,
the blue pestilence and glittering poison of slavery, ‘bogs, dens, and
shades of death—a universe of death.’ This is that true moral atheism,
the equal blasphemy against God and man, the sin against the Holy Ghost,
that lowest deep of debasement and despair to which there is no lower
deep. He who saves me from this conclusion, who makes a mock of this
doctrine, and sets at nought its power, is to me not less than the God
of my idolatry, for he has left one drop of comfort in my soul. The
plague-spot has not tainted me quite; I am not leprous all over, the lie
of Legitimacy does not fix its mortal sting in my inmost soul, nor, like
an ugly spider, entangle me in its slimy folds; but is kept off from me,
and broods on its own poison. He who did this for me, and for the rest
of the world, and who alone could do it, was Buonaparte. He withstood
the inroads of this new Jaggernaut, this foul Blatant Beast, as it
strode forward to its prey over the bodies and minds of a whole people,
and put a ring in its nostrils, breathing flame and blood, and led it in
triumph, and played with its crowns and sceptres, and wore them in its
stead, and tamed its crested pride, and made it a laughing-stock and a
mockery to the nations. He, one man, did this, and as long as he did
this, (how, or for what end, is nothing to the magnitude of this mighty
question) he saved the human race from the last ignominy, and that foul
stain that had so long been intended, and was at last, in an evil hour
and by evil hands, inflicted on it. He put his foot upon the neck of
kings, who would have put their yoke upon the necks of the people: he
scattered before him with fiery execution, millions of hired slaves, who
came at the bidding of their masters to deny the right of others to be
free. The monument of greatness and of glory he erected, was raised on
ground forfeited again and again to humanity—it reared its majestic
front on the ruins of the shattered hopes and broken faith of the common
enemies of mankind. If he could not secure the freedom, peace, and
happiness of his country, he made her a terror to those who by sowing
civil dissension and exciting foreign wars, would not let her enjoy
those blessings. They who had trampled upon Liberty could not at least
triumph in her shame and her despair, but themselves became objects of
pity and derision. Their determination to persist in extremity of wrong
only brought on themselves repeated defeat, disaster, and dismay: the
accumulated aggressions their infuriated pride and disappointed malice
meditated against others, returned in just and aggravated punishment
upon themselves: they heaped coals of fire upon their own heads; they
drank deep and long, in gall and bitterness, of the poisoned chalice
they had prepared for others: the destruction with which they had
threatened a people daring to call itself free, hung suspended over
their heads, like a precipice, ready to fall upon and crush them.
‘Awhile they stood abashed,’ abstracted from their evil purposes, and
felt how awful freedom is, its power how dreadful. Shrunk from the
boasted pomp of royal state into their littleness as men, defeated of
their revenge, baulked of their prey, their schemes stripped of their
bloated pride, and with nothing left but the deformity of their malice,
not daring to utter a syllable or move a finger, the lords of the earth,
who had looked upon men as of an inferior species, born for their use,
and devoted to be their slaves, turned an imploring eye to the people,
and with coward hearts and hollow tongues invoked the name of Liberty,
thus to get the people once more within their unhallowed gripe, and to
stifle the name of Liberty for ever. I never joined the vile and
treacherous cry of spurious humanity in favour of those who have from
the beginning of time, and will to the end of it, make a butt of
humanity, and its distresses their sport. I knew that shameful was this
new alliance between kings and people; fatal this pretended league: that
‘never can true reconcilement grow where wounds of deadly hate have
pierced so deep.’ I was right in this respect. I knew my friends from my
foes. So did Lord Castlereagh: so did not Benjamin Constant. Did any of
the Princes of Europe ever regard Buonaparte as any thing more than the
child and champion of Jacobinism? Why then should I: for on that point I
bow to their judgments as infallible. Passion speaks truer than reason.
If Buonaparte was a conqueror, he conquered the grand conspiracy of
kings against the abstract right of the human race to be free; and I, as
a man, could not be indifferent which side to take. If he was ambitious,
his greatness was not founded on the unconditional, avowed surrender of
the rights of human nature. But with him, the state of man rose exalted
too. If he was arbitrary and a tyrant, first, France as a country was in
a state of military blockade, on garrison-duty, and not to be defended
by mere paper bullets of the brain; secondly, but chief, he was not, nor
he could not become, a tyrant by right divine. Tyranny in him was not
sacred: it was not eternal: it was not instinctively bound in league of
amity with other tyrannies; it was not sanctioned by all the laws of
religion and morality. There was an end of it with the individual: there
was an end of it with the temporary causes, which gave it birth, and of
which it was only the too necessary re-action. But there are persons of
that low and inordinate appetite for servility, that they cannot be
satisfied with any thing short of that sort of tyranny that has lasted
for ever, and is likely to last for ever; that is strengthened and made
desperate by the superstitions and prejudices of ages; that is enshrined
in traditions, in laws, in usages, in the outward symbols of power, in
the very idioms of language; that has struck its roots into the human
heart, and clung round the human understanding like a nightshade; that
overawes the imagination, and disarms the will to resist it, by the very
enormity of the evil; that is cemented with gold and blood; guarded by
reverence, guarded by power; linked in endless succession to the
principle by which life is transmitted to the generations of tyrants and
slaves, and destroying liberty with the first breath of life; that is
absolute, unceasing, unerring, fatal, unutterable, abominable,
monstrous. These true devotees of superstition and despotism cried out
Liberty and Humanity in their desperate phrenzy at Buonaparte’s sudden
elevation and incredible successes against their favourite idol, ‘that
Harlot old, the same that is, that was, and is to be,’ but we have heard
no more of their triumph of Liberty and their _douce humanité_, since
they clapped down the hatches upon us again, like wretches in a
slave-ship who have had their chains struck off and pardon promised them
to fight the common enemy; and the poor Reformers who were taken in to
join the cry, because they are as fastidious in their love of liberty as
their opponents are inveterate in their devotion to despotism, continue
in vain to reproach them with their temporary professions, woeful
grimaces, and vows made in pain, which ease has recanted; but to these
reproaches the legitimate professors of Liberty and Humanity do not even
deign to return the answer of a smile at their credulity and folly.
Those who did not see this result at the time were, I think, weak; those
who do not acknowledge it now are, I am sure, hypocrites.—To this pass
have we been brought by the joint endeavours of Tories, Whigs, and
Reformers; and as they have all had a hand in it, I shall here endeavour
to ascribe to each their share of merit in this goodly piece of work. It
is, perhaps, a delicate point, but it is of no inconsiderable
importance, that the friends of Freedom should know the strength of
their enemies, and their own weakness as well; for
——‘At this day,
When a Tartarean darkness overspreads
The groaning nations; when the impious rule,
By will or by established ordinance,
Their own dire agents, and constrain the good
To acts which they abhor; though I bewail
This triumph, yet the pity of my heart
Prevents me not from owning that the law
By which mankind now suffers, is most just.
For by superior energies; more strict
Affiance to each other; faith more firm
In their unhallowed principles; the bad
Have fairly earned a victory o’er the weak,
The vacillating, inconsistent good.’
A Reformer is not a gregarious animal. Speculative opinion leads men
different ways, each according to his particular fancy:—it is prejudice
or interest that drives before it the herd of mankind. That _which is_,
with all its confirmed abuses and ‘tickling commodities,’ is alone solid
and certain: that _which may be_ or _ought to be_, has a thousand shapes
and colours, according to the eye that sees it, is infinitely variable
and evanescent in its effects. Talk of mobs as we will, the only true
mob is that incorrigible mass of knaves and fools in every country, who
never think at all, and who never feel for any one but themselves. I
call any assembly of people a mob (be it the House of Lords or House of
Commons) where each person’s opinion on any question is governed by what
others say of it, and by what he can get by it. The only instance of
successful resistance in the House of Commons to Ministers for many
years was in the case of the Income-Tax; which touched their own pockets
nearly. This was ‘a feeling disputation,’ in which selfishness got the
better of servility, while reason and humanity might have pleaded in
vain. The exception proved the rule; and this evidence was alone wanting
to establish their character for independence and disinterestedness.
When some years ago Mr. Robson brought forward in the House the case of
an Exchequer Bill for 3_l._ 16_s._ which had been refused payment at the
Bank, the Chancellor of the Exchequer (then Mr. Addington, now Lord
Sidmouth) rose, and in a tone of indignation, severely reprimanded Mr.
Robson for having prematurely brought forward a fact which he knew to be
impossible; and the House cheered the Minister, and scouted Mr. Robson
and his motion for inquiry. The next day, Mr. Robson repeated his
charge, and Mr. Addington rose, and in the same tone of official
authority, brow-beat Mr. Robson for having brought forward, as something
reprehensible and extraordinary, what he said happened every day, though
the day before he had undertaken of his own accord to pronounce it
impossible; and the House cheered the Minister, and scouted Mr. Robson
and his motion for inquiry. What was it to them whether Mr. Robson was
right or wrong? It was their cue (I speak this of the House of Commons
of 1803) to support the Minister, whether right or wrong! Every
corporate body, or casual concourse of people, is nothing more than a
collection of prejudices, and the only arguments current with them, a
collection of watch-words. You may ring the changes for ever on the
terms Bribery and Corruption with the people in Palace-yard, as they do
in the Room over the way on Religion, Loyalty, Public Credit, and Social
Order. There is no difference whatever in this respect between the Great
Vulgar and the Small, who are managed just in the same way by their
different leaders. To procure unanimity, to get men to act in _corps_,
we must appeal for the most part to gross and obvious motives, to
authority and passion, to their vices, not their virtues: we must
discard plain truth and abstract justice as doubtful and inefficient
pleas, retaining only the names and the pretext as a convenient salvo
for hypocrisy! He is the best leader of a party who can find out the
greatest number of common-places faced with the public good; and he will
be the stoutest partisan who can best turn the lining to account.—Tory
sticks to Tory: Whig sticks to Whig: the Reformer sticks neither to
himself nor to any body else. It is no wonder he comes to the ground
with all his schemes and castle-building. A house divided against itself
cannot stand. It is a pity, but it cannot be helped. A Reformer is
necessarily and naturally a Marplot, for the foregoing and the following
reasons. First, he does not very well know what he would be at.
Secondly, if he did, he does not care very much about it. Thirdly, he is
governed habitually by a spirit of contradiction, and is always wise
beyond what is practicable. He is a bad tool to work with; a part of a
machine that never fits its place; he cannot be trained to discipline,
for he follows his own idle humours, or drilled into an obedience to
orders, for the first principle of his mind is the supremacy of
conscience, and the independent right of private judgment. A man to be a
Reformer must be more influenced by imagination and reason than by
received opinions or sensible impressions. With him ideas bear sway over
things; the possible is of more value than the real; that which is not,
is better than that which is. He is by the supposition a speculative
(and somewhat fantastical) character; but there is no end of possible
speculations, of imaginary questions, and nice distinctions; or if there
were, he would not willingly come to it; he would still prefer living in
the world of his own ideas, be for raising some new objection, and
starting some new chimera, and never be satisfied with any plan that he
found he could realise. Bring him to a fixed point, and his occupation
would be gone. A Reformer never is—but always to be blest, in the
accomplishment of his airy hopes and shifting schemes of progressive
perfectibility. Let him have the plaything of his fancy, and he will
spoil it, like the child that makes a hole in its drum: set some
brilliant illusion before his streaming eyes, and he will lay violent
hands upon it, like little wanton boys that play with air-bubbles. Give
him one thing, and he asks for another; like the dog in the fable, he
loses the substance for the shadow: offer him a great good, and he will
not stretch out his hand to take it, unless it were the greatest
possible good. And then who is to determine what is the greatest
possible good? Among a thousand pragmatical speculators, there will be a
thousand opinions on this subject; and the more they differ, the less
will they be inclined to give way or compromise the matter. With each of
these, his self-opinion is the first thing to be attended to; his
understanding must be satisfied in the first place, or he will not budge
an inch; he cannot for the world give up a principle to a party. He
would rather have slavery than liberty, unless it is a liberty precisely
after his own fashion: he would sooner have the Bourbons than
Buonaparte; for he truly is for a Republic, and if he cannot have that,
is indifferent about the rest. So (to compare great things with small)
Mr. Place, of Charing-Cross, chose rather that Mr. Hobhouse should lose
his Election than that it should not be accompanied with his
Resolutions; so he published his Resolutions, and lost Mr. Hobhouse his
Election. That is, a patriot of this stamp is really indifferent about
every thing but what he cannot have; instead of making his option
between two things, a good or an evil, within his reach, our exquisite
Sir sets up a third thing as the object of his choice, with some
impossible condition annexed to it,—to dream, to talk, to write, to be
meddlesome and troublesome about, to serve him for a topic of captious
discontent or vague declamation, and which if he saw any hopes of
cordial agreement or practical co-operation to carry it into effect, he
would instantly contrive to mar, and split it into a thousand fractions,
doubts, and scruples, to make it an impossibility for any thing ever to
be done for the good of mankind, which is merely the plaything of his
theoretical imbecility and active impertinence! The Goddess of his
idolatry is and will always remain a cloud, instead of a Juno. One of
these virtuosos, these Nicolas Gimcracks of Reform, full of intolerable
and vain conceit, sits smiling in the baby-house of his imagination,
‘pleased with a feather, tickled with a straw,’ trimming the balance of
power in the looking-glass of his own self-complacency, having every
thing his own way at a word’s speaking, making the ‘giant-mass’ of
things only a reflection of his personal pretensions, approving every
thing that is right, condemning every thing that is wrong, in compliment
to his own character, considering how what he says will affect not the
cause, but himself; keeping himself aloof from party-spirit, and from
every thing that can cast a shade on the fancied delicacy of his own
breast, and thus letting the cause of Liberty slip through his fingers,
and be spilt like water on the ground:—while another, more bold than he,
in a spirit of envy and ignorance, quarrels with all those who are
labouring at the same oar, lays about him like mad, runs a-muck at every
one who has done, or is likely to do, any thing to promote the common
object, and with his desperate club dashes out his neighbour’s brains,
and thinks he has done a good piece of service to the cause, because he
has glutted his own ill-humour and self-will, which he mistakes for the
love of liberty and a zeal for truth! Others, not able to do mischief
enough singly, club their senseless contradictions and unmanageable
humours together, turn their attention to cabal and chicane, get into
committees, make speeches, move or second resolutions, dictate to their
followers, set up for the heads of a party, in opposition to another
party; abuse, vilify, expose, betray, counteract and undermine each
other in every way, and throw the game into the hands of the common
enemy, who laughs in his sleeve, and watches them and their little
perverse, pettifogging passions at work for him, from the high tower of
his pride and strength! If an honest and able man arises among them,
they grow jealous of him, and would rather, in the petty ostracism of
their minds, that their cause should fail, than that another should have
the credit of bringing it to a triumphant conclusion. They criticise his
conduct, carp at his talents, denounce his friends, suspect his motives,
and do not rest, till by completely disgusting him with the name of
Reform and Reformers, they have made him what they wish, a traitor and
deserter from a cause that no man can serve! This is just what they
like—they satisfy their malice, they have to find out a new leader, and
the cause is to begin again! So it was, and so it will be, while man
remains the little, busy, mischievous animal described in Gulliver’s
Travels!—A pretty hopeful set to make head against their opponents—a
rope of sand against a rock of marble—with no centre of gravity, but a
collection of atoms whirled about in empty space by their own levity, or
jostling together by numberless points of repulsion, and tossed with all
their officious projects and airy predictions, by the first breath of
caprice or shock of power, into that Limbo of Vanity, where embryo
statesmen and drivelling legislators dance the hays of Reform,
‘perpetual circle, multiform and mix, and hinder all things,’ proud of
the exclusive purity of their own motives, and the unattainable
perfection of their own plans!—How different from the self-centred,
well-knit, inseparable phalanx of power and authority opposed to their
impotent and abortive designs! A Tory is one who is governed by sense
and habit alone. He considers not what is possible, but what is real; he
gives might the preference over right. He cries Long Life to the
conqueror, and is ever strong upon the stronger side—the side of
corruption and prerogative. He says what others say; he does as he is
prompted by his own advantage. He knows on which side his bread is
buttered, and that St. Peter is well at Rome. He is for going with
Sancho to Camacho’s wedding, and not for wandering with Don Quixote in
the desert, after the mad lover. Strait is the gate and narrow is the
way that leadeth to Reform, but broad is the way that leadeth to
Corruption, and multitudes there are that walk therein. The Tory is sure
to be in the thickest of them. His principle is to follow the leader;
and this is the infallible rule to have numbers and success on your
side, to be on the side of success and numbers. Power is the rock of his
salvation; priestcraft is the second article of his implicit creed. He
does not trouble himself to inquire which is the best form of
government—but he knows that the reigning monarch is ‘the best of
kings.’ He does not, like a fool, contest for modes of faith; but like a
wise man, swears by that which is by law established. He has no
principles himself, nor does he profess to have any, but will cut your
throat for differing with any of his bigotted dogmas, or for objecting
to any act of power that he supposes necessary to his interest. He will
take his Bible-oath that black is white, and that whatever is, is right,
if it is for his convenience. He is for having a slice in the loan, a
share in a borough, a situation in the church or state, or for standing
well with those who have. He is not for empty speculations, but for full
pockets. He is for having plenty of beef and pudding, a good coat to his
back, a good house over his head, and for cutting a respectable figure
in the world. He is _Epicuri de grege porcus_—not a man but a beast. He
is styed in his prejudices—he wallows in the mire of his senses—he
cannot get beyond the trough of his sordid appetites, whether it is of
gold or wood. Truth and falsehood are, to him, something to buy and
sell; principle and conscience, something to eat and drink. He tramples
on the plea of Humanity, and lives, like a caterpillar, on the decay of
public good. Beast as he is, he knows that the King is the fountain of
honour, that there are good things to be had in the Church, treats the
cloth with respect, bows to a magistrate, lies to the tax-gatherer,
nicknames the Reformers, and ‘blesses the Regent and the Duke of York.’
He treads the primrose path of preferment; ‘when a great wheel goes up a
hill, holds fast by it, and when it rolls down, lets it go.’ He is not
an enthusiast, a Utopian philosopher or a Theophilanthropist, but a man
of business and the world, who minds the main chance, does as other
people do, and takes his wife’s advice to get on in the world, and set
up a coach for her to ride in, as fast as possible. This fellow is in
the right, and ‘wiser in his generation than the children of the light.’
The ‘servile slaves’ of wealth and power have a considerable advantage
over the independent and the free. How much easier is it to smell out a
job than to hit upon a scheme for the good of mankind! How much safer is
it to be the tool of the oppressor than the advocate of the oppressed!
How much more fashionable to fall in with the opinion of the world, to
bow the knee to Baal, than to seek for obscure and obnoxious truth! How
strong are the ties that bind men together for their own advantage,
compared with those that bind them to the good of their country or of
their kind! For as the Reformer has no guide to his conclusions but
speculative reason, which is a source not of unanimity or certainty, but
of endless doubt and disagreement, so he has no ground of attachment to
them but a speculative interest, which is too often liable to be warped
by sinister motives, and is a flimsy barrier against the whole weight of
worldly and practical interests opposed to it. He either tires and grows
lukewarm after the first gloss of novelty is over, and is thrown into
the hands of the adverse party, or to keep alive an interest in it, he
makes it the stalking-horse of his ambition, of his personal enmity, of
his conceit or love of gossipping; as we have seen. An opinion backed by
power and prejudice, rivetted and mortised to the throne, is of more
force and validity than all the abstract reason in the world, without
power and prejudice. A cause centred in an individual, which is
strengthened by all the ties of passion and self-interest, as in the
case of a king against a whole people, is more likely to prevail than
that of a scattered multitude, who have only a common and divided
interest to hold them together, and ‘screw their courage to the
sticking-place,’ against an influence, that is never distracted or
dissipated; that neither slumbers nor sleeps; that is never lulled into
security, nor tamed by adversity; that is intoxicated with the insolence
of success, and infuriated with the rage of disappointment; that eyes
its one sole object of personal aggrandisement, moves unremittingly to
it, and carries after it millions of its slaves and train-bearers. Can
you persuade a king to hear reason, to submit his pretensions to the
tribunal of the people, to give up the most absurd and mischievous of
his prerogatives? No: he is always true to himself, he grasps at power
and hugs it close, as it is exorbitant or invidious, or likely to be
torn from him; and his followers stick to him, and never boggle at any
lengths they are forced to go, because they know what they have to trust
to in the good faith of kings to themselves and one another. Power then
is fixed and immoveable, for this reason, because it is lodged in an
individual who is driven to madness by the undisputed possession, or
apprehended loss of it; his self-will is the key-stone that supports the
tottering arch of corruption, steadfast as it leans on him:—liberty is
vacillating, transient, and hunted through the world, because it is
entrusted to the breasts of many, who care little about it, and quarrel
in the execution of their trust. Too many cooks spoil the broth. The
principle of tyranny is in fact identified with a man’s pride and the
servility of others in the highest degree; the principle of liberty
abstracts him from himself, and has to contend in its feeble course with
all his own passions, prejudices, interests, and those of the world and
of his own party; the cavils of Reformers, the threats of Tories, and
the sneers of Whigs.[5]
A modern Whig is but the fag-end of a Tory. The old Whigs were in
principle what the modern Jacobins are, Anti-Jacobites, that is,
opposers of the doctrine of divine right, the one in the soil of
England, the other by parity of reasoning in the soil of France. But the
Opposition have pressed so long against the Ministry without effect,
that being the softer substance, and made of more yielding materials,
they have been moulded into their image and superscription, spelt
backwards, or they differ as concave and convex, or they go together
like substantive and adjective, or like man and wife, they two have
become one flesh. A Tory is the indispensable prop to the doubtful sense
of self-importance, and peevish irritability of negative success, which
mark the life of a Whig leader or underling. They ‘are subdued even to
the very quality’ of the Lords of the Treasury Bench, and have
quarrelled so long that they would be quite at a loss without the
ordinary food of political contention. To interfere between them is as
dangerous as to interfere in a matrimonial squabble. To overturn the one
is to trip up the heels of the other. Their hostility is not directed
against things at all, nor to effectual and decisive opposition to men,
but to that sort of petty warfare and parliamentary _tracasserie_, of
which there is neither end nor use, except making the parties concerned
of consequence in their own eyes, and contemptible in those of the
nation. They will not allow Ministers to be severely handled by any one
but themselves, nor even that: but they say civil things of them in the
House of Commons, and whisper scandal against them at Holland House.
This shews gentlemanly refinement and good breeding; while my Lord
Erskine ‘calls us untaught knaves, unmannerly to come betwixt the wind
and his nobility.’ But the leaden bullets and steel bayonets, the
_ultima ratio regum_, by which these questions are practically decided,
do their business in another-guess manner; they do not stand on the same
ceremony. Soft words and hard blows are a losing game to play at: and
this, one would think, the Opposition, if they were sincere, must have
found out long ago. But they rather wish to screen the Ministry, as
their _locum tenens_ in the receipt of the perquisites of office and the
abuse of power, of which they themselves expect the reversion.
‘Strange that such difference should be
Twixt Tweedledum and Tweedledee.’
The distinction between a great Whig and Tory Lord is laughable. For
Whigs to Tories ‘nearly are allied, and thin partitions do their bounds
divide.’ So I cannot find out the different drift (as far as politics
are concerned) of the ********* and ********* Reviews, which remind one
of Opposition coaches, that raise a great dust or spatter one another
with mud, but both travel the same road and arrive at the same
destination. When the Editor of a respectable Morning Paper reproached
me with having called Mr. Gifford a cat’s-paw, I did not tell him that
he was a glove upon that cat’s-paw. I might have done so. There is a
difference between a sword and a foil. The Whigs do not at all relish
that ugly thing, a knock-down blow; which is so different from their
endless see-saw way of going about a question. They are alarmed, ‘lest
the courtiers offended should be:’ for they are so afraid of their
adversaries, that they dread the re-action even of successful opposition
to them, and will neither attempt it themselves, nor stand by any one
that does. Any writer who is not agreeable to the Tories, becomes
obnoxious to the Whigs; he is disclaimed by them as a dangerous
colleague, merely for having ‘done the cause some service;’ is
considered as having the malicious design to make a breach of the peace,
and to interrupt with most admired disorder the harmony and mutual good
understanding which subsists between Ministers and the Opposition, and
on the adherence to which they are alone suffered to exist, or to have a
shadow of importance in the state. They are, in fact, a convenient
medium to break the force of popular feeling, and to transmit the rays
of popular indignation against the influence and power of the crown,
blunted and neutralized by as many qualifications and refractions as
possible. A Whig is properly what is called a Trimmer—that is, a coward
to both sides of a question, who dare not be a knave nor an honest man,
but is a sort of whiffling, shuffling, cunning, silly, contemptible,
unmeaning negation of the two. He is a poor purblind creature, who halts
between two opinions, and complains that he cannot get any two people to
think alike. He is a cloak for corruption, and a mar-plot to freedom. He
will neither do any thing himself, nor let any one else do it. He is on
bad terms with the Government, and not on good ones with the people. He
is an impertinence and a contradiction in the state. If he has a casting
weight, for fear of overdoing the mark, he throws it into the wrong
scale. He is a person of equally feeble understanding and passions. He
has some notion of what is right, just enough to hinder him from
pursuing his own interest: he has selfish and worldly prudence enough,
not to let him embark in any bold or decided measure for the advancement
of truth and justice. He is afraid of his own conscience, which will not
let him lend his unqualified support to arbitrary measures; he stands in
awe of the opinion of the world, which will not let him express his
opposition to those measures with warmth and effect. His politics are a
strange mixture of cross-purposes. He is wedded to forms and
appearances, impeded by every petty obstacle and pretext of difficulty,
more tenacious of the means than the end—anxious to secure all
suffrages, by which he secures none—hampered not only by the ties of
friendship to his actual associates, but to all those that he thinks may
become so; and unwilling to offer arguments to convince the reason of
his opponents lest he should offend their prejudices, by shewing them
how much they are in the wrong; ‘letting I dare not wait upon I would,
like the poor cat in the adage;’ stickling for the letter of the
Constitution, with the affectation of a prude, and abandoning its
principles with the effrontery of a prostitute to any shabby Coalition
he can patch up with its deadly enemies. This is very pitiful work; and,
I believe, the public with me are tolerably sick of the character. At
the same time, he hurls up his cap with a foolish face of wonder and
incredulity at the restoration of the Bourbons, and affects to chuckle
with secret satisfaction over the last act of the Revolution, which
reduced him to perfect insignificance. We need not wonder at the
results, when it comes to the push between parties so differently
constituted and unequally matched. We have seen what those results are.
I cannot do justice to the picture, but I find it done to my hands in
those prophetic lines of Pope, where he describes the last Triumph of
Corruption:—
‘But ’tis the fall degrades her to a whore:
Let greatness own her, and she’s mean no more.
Her birth, her beauty, crowds and courts confess;
Chaste matrons praise her, and grave bishops bless:
In golden chains the willing world she draws,
And her’s the Gospel is, and her’s the Laws;
Mounts the tribunal, lifts her scarlet head,
And sees pale virtue carted in her stead.
Lo! at the wheels of her triumphal car,
Old England’s genius, rough with many a scar,
Dragg’d in the dust! his arms hang idly round,
His flag inverted trails along the ground:
Our youth, all liveried o’er with foreign gold,
Before her dance, behind her crawl the old!
See thronging millions to the Pagod run,
And offer country, parent, wife, or son!
Hear her black trumpet thro’ the land proclaim,
That _not to be corrupted, is the shame_.
In soldier, churchman, patriot, man in power,
’Tis avarice all, ambition is no more!
See all our nobles begging to be slaves!
See all our fools aspiring to be knaves!
All, all look up with reverential awe
At crimes that ‘scape or triumph o’er the law;
While truth, worth, wisdom daily they decry:
“Nothing is sacred now but villainy.”
Yet may this verse (if such a verse remain)
Shew there was one who held it in disdain.’
POLITICAL ESSAYS, &c.
THE MARQUIS WELLESLEY
‘And such other gambol faculties he hath, as shew a weak mind, and
an able body.’
_April 13, 1813._
The Marquis Wellesley’s opening speech on India affairs was chiefly
remarkable for its length, and the manner in which it was delivered.
This nobleman seems to have formed himself on those lines in Pope:—
‘All hail him victor in both gifts of song,
Who sings so loudly, and who sings so long.’
He aspires with infinite alacrity to the character of a great orator;
and, if we were disposed to take the will for the deed, we should give
him full credit for it. We confess, those of his speeches which we have
heard, appear to us prodigies of physical prowess and intellectual
imbecility. The ardour of his natural temperament, stimulating and
irritating the ordinary faculties of his mind, the exuberance of his
animal spirits, contending with the barrenness of his genius, produce a
degree of dull vivacity, of pointed insignificance, and impotent energy,
which is without any parallel but itself. It is curious, though somewhat
painful, to see this lively little lord always in the full career of his
subject, and never advancing a jot the nearer; seeming to utter volumes
in every word, and yet saying nothing; retaining the same unabated
vehemence of voice and action without any thing to excite it; still
keeping alive the promise and the expectation of genius without once
satisfying it—soaring into mediocrity with adventurous enthusiasm,
harrowed up by some plain matter-of-fact, writhing with agony under a
truism, and launching a common-place with all the fury of a
thunderbolt![6]
MR. SOUTHEY, POET LAUREAT
_Sept. 18, 1813._
The laurel is at length destined, unexpectedly, to circle the brows of
this gentleman, where it will look almost like a civic crown. The
patriot and the poet (two venerable names, which we should wish never to
see disunited) is said to owe his intended elevation to the intercession
of Mr. Croker, to whom, it will be recollected, he has dedicated his
Life of Lord Nelson, with an appropriate motto in the title-page, from
the poem of Ulm and Trafalgar. Mr. Croker having applied to the Regent
in favour of his friend, the Prince is understood to have given his
ready assent, observing, that Mr. Southey’s efforts in the Spanish cause
alone, rendered him highly worthy of the situation. As Mr. Croker,
however, was taking his leave, he was met by Lord Liverpool and the
Marquis of Hertford, the latter of whom, as chamberlain, had, it seems,
made an offer of the place to Mr. Walter Scott, who had signified his
acceptance of it. Some little difficulty naturally arose on the
occasion, but it was agreed that the two poets should settle the point
of precedence between themselves. A friendly altercation, unlike that of
the shepherds in Virgil, now took place between Mr. Scott and Mr.
Southey, each waving his own pretensions, and giving the palm of victory
to the other. But it was finally determined, that as Mr. Scott, though
he would not allow himself to be the greatest, was at least the richest
poet of the two, Mr. Southey, who had most need of this post of honour
and of profit, should have it. So ends this important affair; and,
without any ill-will to Mr. Southey, we should not have been
disappointed if it had ended differently. Whatever may be the balance of
poetical merit, Mr. Scott, we are quite sure, has always been a much
better courtier than Mr. Southey; and we are of opinion that the honours
of a Court can nowhere be so gracefully or deservedly bestowed as on its
followers. His acceptance of this mark of court favour would not have
broken in upon that uniformity of character, which we think no less
beautiful and becoming in life than in a poem. But, perhaps, a passion
for new faces extends to the intrigues of politics as well as of love;
and a triumph over the scruples of delicacy enhances the value of the
conquest in both cases. To _have been_ the poet of the people, may not
render Mr. Southey less a court favourite; and one of his old Sonnets to
Liberty must give a peculiar zest to his new Birth-day Odes. His flaming
patriotism will easily subside into the gentle glow of grateful loyalty;
and the most extravagant of his plans of reform end in building castles
in Spain!
MR. SOUTHEY’S NEW-YEAR’S ODE
_Jan. 8, 1814._
Mr. Southey’s Ode has at length appeared—not as was announced, under the
title of ‘Carmen Annuum,’ but under that of ‘CARMEN TRIUMPHALE, _for the
Commencement of the Year 1814_.’ We see no reason why the author might
not have adopted the title of Horace’s Ode entire, and have called it
_Carmen Seculare_, which would have been the best account he could give
of it. We fear Mr. Southey will not form a splendid exception to the
numberless instances which prove that there is something in the air of a
court, not favourable to the genius of poetry. He has not deprived
himself of the excuse made by one of his predecessors, of versatile
memory, in extenuation of the degeneracy of his courtly lays,—‘That
poets succeed best in fiction.’ The Ode is in the ballad style, peculiar
to Mr. Southey and his poetical friends. It has something of the rustic
simplicity of a country virgin on her first introduction at Duke’s
Place, or of Pamela on the day of her marriage with Mr. B. Or rather it
resembles a _fancy_ birth-day suit, a fashionable livery worn inside
out, a prince’s feather with a sprig of the tree of liberty added to
it,—the academy of compliments turned into quaint Pindarics,—is a sort
of methodistical rhapsody, chaunted by a gentleman-usher, and exhibits
the irregular vigour of Jacobin enthusiasm suffering strange
emasculation under the hands of a finical lord-chamberlain. It is
romantic without interest, and tame without elegance. It is exactly such
an ode as we expected Mr. Southey to compose on this occasion. We say
this from our respect for the talents and character of this eminent
writer. He is the last man whom we should expect to see graceful in
fetters, or from whom we should look for the soul of freedom within the
_liberties of a court_!—The commencement of the Ode is as follows, and
it continues throughout much as it begins:—
‘In happy hour _doth_ he receive
The Laurel, meed of famous bards of _yore_,
Which Dryden and diviner Spenser wore,
_In happy hour_, and well may he rejoice,
Whose earliest task _must be_
To raise the _exultant_ hymn for _victory_,
And _join_ a nation’s _joy_ with harp and voice,
Pouring the strain of triumph on the wind,
Glory to God, his song—deliverance to mankind!
Wake, lute and harp! &c. &c.’
Mr. Southey has not exactly followed the suggestion of an ingenious
friend, to begin his poem with the appropriate allusion,
‘Awake, my sack-but!’
The following rhymes are the lamest we observed. He says, speaking of
the conflict between the Moors and Spaniards,
‘Age after age, from sire to _son_,
The hallowed sword was handed _down_;
Nor did they from that warfare cease,
And sheath that hallowed sword in peace,
Until the work was _done_.’
Indeed, if Mr. S. can do no better than this, in his drawing-room
verses, he should get some contributor to the Lady’s Magazine to polish
them for him.
We have turned over the Ode again, which extends to twenty pages, in the
hope of finding some one vigorous or striking passage for selection, but
in vain. The following is the most likely to please in a certain
quarter:—
‘Open thy gates, O Hanover! display
Thy loyal banners to the day!
Receive thy old illustrious line once more!
Beneath an upstart’s yoke oppress’d,
Long has it been thy fortune to deplore
That line, whose fostering and paternal sway
So many an age thy grateful children blest.
The yoke is broken now!—a mightier hand
Hath dash’d—in pieces dash’d—the iron rod.
To meet her princes, the delivered land
Pours her rejoicing multitudes abroad;
The happy bells, from every town and tower,
Roll their glad peals upon the joyful wind;
And from all hearts and tongues, with one consent,
The high thanksgiving strain is sent—
Glory to God! Deliverance to mankind!’
In various stanzas, Bonaparte is called an upstart, a ruffian, &c. We
confess, we wish to see Mr. Southey, like Virgil, in his Georgics,
‘scatter his dung with a grace.’
We do not intend to quarrel with our Laureat’s poetical politics, but
the conclusion is one which we did not anticipate from the author. We
have always understood that the Muses were the daughters of Memory!
‘And France, _restored_ and shaking off her chain,
Shall join the Avengers in the joyful strain—
Glory to God! Deliverance for mankind!’
The poem has a few notes added to it, the object of which seems to be to
criticise the political opinions of the Edinburgh Reviewers with respect
to Spain, and to prove that the author is wiser after the event than
they were before it, in which he has very nearly succeeded.
Mr. Southey announces a new volume of Inscriptions, which must furnish
some curious _parallelisms_.
DOTTREL-CATCHING
TO THE EDITOR OF THE MORNING CHRONICLE
_Jan. 27, 1814._
Sir, The method of taking this bird is somewhat singular, and is
described in an old book in the following terms:
‘The Dottrel is a foolish bird of the crane species, very tall, awkward,
and conceited. The Dottrel-catcher, when he has got near enough, turns
his head round sideways, and _makes a leg_ towards him: the bird, seeing
this, returns the civility, and makes the same sidelong movement. These
advances are repeated with mutual satisfaction, till the man approaches
near enough, and then the bird is taken.’
A poet-laureat or a treasury sophist is often taken much in the same
way. Your Opposionist, Sir, was ever a true _gull_. From the general
want of sympathy, he sets more store by it than it is worth; and for the
smallest concession, is prevailed upon to give up every principle, and
to surrender himself, bound hand and foot, the slave of a party, who get
all they want of him, and then—‘Spunge, you are dry again!’
A striking illustration of the common treatment of political drudges has
lately occurred in the instance of a celebrated writer, whose
lucubrations are withheld from the public, because he has declared
against the project of restoring the Bourbons. As the court and city
politicians have spoken out on this subject, permit me, Sir, to say a
word in behalf of the country. I have no dislike whatever, private or
public, to the Bourbons, except as they may be made the pretext for
mischievous and impracticable schemes. At the same time I have not the
slightest enthusiasm in their favour. I would not sacrifice the life or
limb of a single individual to restore them. I have very nearly the same
feelings towards them which Swift has expressed in his account of the
ancient and venerable race of the Struldbruggs. It is true, they might
in some respects present a direct contrast to Bonaparte. A tortoise
placed on the throne of France would do the same thing. The literary
sycophants of the day, Sir, are greatly enamoured (from some cause or
other) with hereditary imbecility and native want of talent. They are
angry, not without reason, that a Corsican upstart has made the princes
of Europe look like wax-work figures, and given a shock to the still
life of kings. They wish to punish this unpardonable presumption, by
establishing an artificial balance of _weakness_ throughout Europe, and
by reducing humanity to the level of thrones. We may perhaps in time
improve this principle of ricketty admiration to Eastern perfection,
where every changeling is held sacred, and that which is the disgrace of
human intellect is hailed as the image of the Divinity!
It is said that in France the old royalists and the revolutionary
republicans are agreed in the same point. Bonaparte is the point of
union between these opposite extremes, the common object of their hate
and fear. I can conceive this very possible from what I have observed
among ourselves. He has certainly done a great deal to mortify the pride
of birth in the one, and the vanity of personal talents in the others.
This is a very sufficient ground of private pique and resentment, but
not of national calamity or eternal war. I am, Sir, your humble servant,
EICONOCLASTES SATYRANE.
THE BOURBONS AND BONAPARTE
_Dec. 6, 1813._
The following paragraph in a daily paper is equally worthy of notice for
magnificence of expression and magnanimity of sentiment:—
‘When or under what circumstances the great Commander may think fit to
carry his forces against the large military or commercial depôts of the
south of France, we do not pretend to form conjectures. We are
confident, that as nothing will disturb the calm and meditative prudence
of his plans, so nothing will arrest the rapidity of their execution. We
trust alike in his caution and in his resolution: but, perhaps, there
may be in store for him a higher destination than the capture of a town
or the reduction of a province. What if the army opposed to him should
resolve to avenge the cause of humanity, and to exchange the bloody and
brutal tyranny of a Bonaparte for the mild paternal sway of a Bourbon?
Could a popular French general open to himself a more glorious career at
the present moment, than that which Providence seemed to have destined
to the virtuous Moreau? Or is it possible that any power now existing in
France could stop such a general and such an army, supported by the
unconquered Wellington and his formidable legions, if they were to
resolve boldly to march to Paris, and bring the usurper to the block!
Every disposable soldier in France is on the Adour, or on the Rhine. In
the case we are supposing, there would be no enemy to encounter, unless
the northern frontier were at once denuded of troops, and the road to
Paris on that side laid open to the allies. This is no question of the
attachment of the French nation to one dynasty or to another: it is a
question of military enterprise, in the minds of military adventurers.
The simple possibility, not to say the high moral probability, that in a
moment of general defection, an army which has so much in its hands may
run with the stream of popular feeling throughout Europe, is enough to
make the tyrant tremble on his throne. Lord Wellington is doubtless
prepared to take advantage of so desirable an occurrence, in case it
should happen without his previous interference: but we wish him to
interfere; we wish that he were authorised plainly and openly to offer
his mighty co-operation to any body of men who would shake off the
Tyrant’s yoke in France, as has been done in Italy, in Germany, and in
Holland!’
This is a fair specimen of that kind of declamation which has for a long
time swayed the affairs of Europe, and which, if the powers of Europe
are wise by experience, will not influence them much longer. It is this
spirit of treating the French people as of a different species from
ourselves—as a monster or a non-entity—of disposing of their government
at the will of every paragraph-monger—of arming our hatred against them
by ridiculous menaces and incessant reproaches—of supposing that their
power was either so tremendous as to threaten the existence of all
nations, or so contemptible that we could crush it by a word,—it is this
uniform system, practised by the incendiaries of the press, of inflaming
our prejudices and irritating our passions, that has so often made us
rush upon disaster, and submit to every extremity rather than forego the
rancorous and headstrong desire of revenge.
The writer of the paragraph talks familiarly of marching to Paris, and
bringing Bonaparte to the block. He seems to wonder at the delay which
has already taken place. This is the very style of ancient Pistol, ‘Bid
him prepare, for I will cut his throat.’ This high tone of impotent
menace and premature triumph always ‘reverbs its own hollowness.’ It is
the echo of fear. Instead of a proud repose on our own strength and
courage, these writers only feel secure in the destruction of an
adversary. The natural intoxication of success is heightened into a sort
of delirium by the recollection of the panic into which they had been
thrown. _The Times’_ editor thinks that nothing can be so easy as for an
army ‘to run with the stream of popular feeling’ from one end of Europe
to the other. Strange that these persons, like desperate adventurers,
are incorrigible to experience. They are always setting out on the same
forlorn hope. The tide of fortune, while it sets in strong against us,
they prove to be the most variable of all things; but it no sooner
changes in our favour, than it straight
‘Flows on to the Propontic,
And knows no ebb.’
To encourage themselves in the extravagance of their voluntary
delusions, they are as prodigal of titles of honour as the college of
heralds, and erect a standard of military fame, with all the authority,
but not with the impartiality of history. Lord Wellington is ‘the great
commander,’ and ‘the unconquered general,’ while ‘the little captain,’
and ‘the hero’ or ‘the deserter of Smorgonne,’ are the only
qualifications of Bonaparte. If such are the true denominations and
relative proportions of these two generals, then it is quite right to
give to each of them the honour due;—if they are not, then it is quite
wrong to stake the welfare of nations on a turn of expression—to put
little equivocal scraps of paper into false scales, and decide the fate
of Europe by nicknames. The scales in which Sir Humphrey Davy weighs the
500th part of a drachm, are not so slight nor insignificant as those in
which his vilifiers, _The Times_, balance the destinies of the world.
‘What,’ it is asked with a certain air of profundity and mystery, ‘What
if the army opposed to him [Lord Wellington] should resolve to exchange
the bloody tyranny of Bonaparte for the paternal sway of a Bourbon!’
Why, if the French wish to shake off the galling yoke of a military
Usurper, we say, let them do it in God’s name. Let them, whenever they
please, imitate us in our recal of the Stuarts; and, whenever they
please, in our banishment of them thirty years afterwards. But let them
not, in the name of honour or of manhood, receive the royal boon of
liberty at the point of the bayonet. It would be setting a bad
precedent—it would be breaking in upon a great principle—it would be
making a gap in the general feeling of national independence. For we are
to observe, that this rational, popular, patriotic preference of the
mild paternal sway of the Bourbons is to be enforced upon them by the
powerful co-operation of the unconquered Wellington and his formidable
legions. This is, in fact, returning to the original ground of the whole
quarrel, and the question for them to consider, is whether all the evils
and miseries which they may have endured in resisting these forcible
appeals from foreign powers, are the strongest reasons why they should
at length gratefully resign themselves to that tender concern for their
sufferings, which so much persevering kindness, and disinterested
preference of their interests to our own unequivocally proves. The
impression produced by these formidable emissaries of mild paternity
must, indeed, be only that of filial love and reverence. The constant
_role_ of these same Bourbons, now recognized, now disowned by the
surrounding states, now held up as bugbears to frighten, and now brought
forward as decoys to allure them, for awhile kept entirely in the
back-ground, and then again set over them like puppets, in every reverse
of fortune, must excite, one would suppose, some very pleasant
associations, and give them some little insight into the nature of the
machinery which is played off against them. In other nations, at least,
these sort of _tentatives_ would lead not to submission, but to
indignation. It cannot be denied, however, that the French character has
peculiar susceptibilities. France, like a modern coquet, may be
fascinated once more by the courtly graces of discarded royalty; or, on
the other hand, recollecting the malice and the impotence of which she
was so long the victim, like Hellenore, entertained by the jolly satyrs,
may wisely refuse to return to the cold and irksome embraces of the
drivelling Malbecco. But our politician wishes all this not to be left
to their own free will, but that we should interfere. We can easily
believe it; ‘it was ever the fault of our English nation’ to wish to
interfere with what did not concern them, for the very reason that they
could interfere with comparative impunity. What is sport to them is
death to others. The writer also draws a parallel, as if it were a
feasible case, between Holland, Spain, and Germany throwing off a
foreign yoke, and the French throwing off their own; in other words,
submitting to a foreign one. We beg pardon of these acute
discriminators. We know they have an answer. We leave them in possession
of the nice distinction—between a foreign yoke, and a yoke imposed by
foreigners!
‘This,’ says the writer in _The Times_, ‘is not a question of attachment
to one dynasty or another, but a question of military enterprize between
military adventurers.’ Does our speculator mean by this to confer the
privileges of military adventurers, _en plein droit_, on the Emperor
Alexander and the Crown Prince of Sweden? But whatever he means, it is
clear that he is not consistent in what he says; for he has said just
before, that the object of this so often repeated march to Paris is ‘to
bring the Usurper to the block!’ Here, then, it is a question, not
between contending generals, but between a usurper and a lawful monarch.
So true it is that those who have most need of their assistance have the
worst memories! ‘What,’ exclaims our enthusiast, ‘would there be to
oppose such a general and such an army, aided by the unconquered
Wellington,’ &c. First, ‘this is the very coinage of his brain.’ There’s
no such general and no such army.
But granting the supposition to be true, the patriotic general, who
should open to himself a glorious passage through the heart of his
country, and attempt to make it the vassal of England, under the
monstrous pretence of allegiance to his Sovereign, might perhaps meet
the fate which Providence destined for the virtuous Moreau. Perhaps the
French may think that as their affected loyalty could be only a cover
for the most dastardly submission, so their hypocrisy and treachery to
themselves might be justly retaliated upon them, by making the
restoration of thrones a mask for the dismemberment of kingdoms. They
may have acquired by experience some knowledge of that enlargement of
view and boldness of nerve, which is inspired by the elevation of
success. They may consider, that ‘when the wild and savage passions are
set afloat, they are not so easily regulated’ according to the dictates
of justice or generosity. Some of them may even go so far as to think
that all the respect of the Emperor of Russia for the talents and
virtues of Moreau might be insufficient to deter him from memorizing
another Warsaw at Paris! Of this we are tolerably certain, that there
are not wanting staunch friends of order and civilization in this
country who would advise and applaud such a catastrophe ‘to the very
echo,’ as a masterpiece of political justice, chaunt _Te Deum_ over the
ruins, and very seriously invite the good people of France to join in
the chorus! But we are not ‘the echo that shall applaud again.’ We shall
not hail such a catastrophe, nor such a triumph. For out of the
desolation would arise a poisoned stench that would choak almost the
breath of life, and one low, creeping fog of universal despotism, that
would confound the Eastern and the Western world together _in darkness
that might be felt_. We do not wish for this final consummation, because
we do not wish the pulse of liberty to be quite destroyed, or that the
mass of our common nature should become a lifeless corpse, unable to
rouse itself against never-ending wrongs, or that the last spark of
generous enthusiasm should be extinguished in that moral atheism, which
defaces and mangles the image of God in man. We do not wish that liberty
should ever have a deer’s heart given her, to live in constant fear of
the fatal, inevitable venal pack behind her; but that she may still have
the heart of a lioness, whose mighty roar keeps the hunters at bay, and
whose whelps revenge their parent’s death!
Rather than such an event should take place, if such an extremity were
possible, we should even wish that a general and an army of our own,
devoted by _The Times_ to a far different service, might be empowered to
make a firm stand against it: to stop the tide of barbarous despotism as
they had already rolled back that of ungovernable ambition, and to say,
Hitherto shalt thou come, and no further. Such an interference in such a
cause would indeed give to Great Britain the character which she claims
of being the Vindicator of the World. It would be to assume an attitude
and a port indeed, loftier than she ever yet presented to the admiration
of mankind; and would create a bulwark of strength round her, that would
encircle her as with ‘impaling fire’!
VETUS
_Nov. 19, 1813._
This patriot and logician in a letter in _The Times_ of Friday, labours
to stifle the most distant hope of peace in its birth. He lays down
certain general principles which must for ever render all attempts to
restore it vain and abortive. With the watchword of _Eternal war with
Bonaparte_ blazoned on his forehead, in the piety of his pacific zeal,
he challenges Bonaparte as the wanton, unprovoked, implacable enemy of
the peace of mankind. We will also venture to lay down a maxim, which
is—That from the moment that one party declares and acts upon the avowed
principle that peace can never be made with an enemy, it renders war on
the part of that enemy a matter of necessary self-defence, and holds out
a plea for every excess of ambition or revenge. If we are to limit our
hostility to others only with their destruction, we impose the adoption
of the same principle on them as their only means of safety. There is no
alternative. But this is probably the issue to which Vetus wishes to
bring the question. This writer not only outlaws Bonaparte, but in a
summary way, disfranchises the French nation at large of the right of
making peace or war. ‘Who,’ he exclaims in wanton defiance of common
sense, ‘are the French nation? To us a rank non-entity. We have only to
do with Napoleon Bonaparte—with his rights, his interests, his honour.
Who are to be the sole judges of his rights? We and our allies!’
Admirable politician!
The events which have lately taken place on the Continent, and the
moderate and manly tone in which those events have been received by
Ministers, have excited the utmost degree of uneasiness and alarm in the
minds of certain persons, who redouble the eagerness of their cries for
war. The cold blooded fury and mercenary malice of these panders to
mischief, can only be appeased by the prospect of lasting desolation.
They rave, foam at the mouth, and make frantic gestures at the name of
peace. These high-priests of Moloch daily offer up to their grim idol
the same nauseous banquet of abuse and lies. Round them ‘a cry of
hell-hounds never ceasing bark,’ that with greedy appetite devour the
offal. Every day they act over the same foul imposture, and repeat their
monstrous masque. These mighty soothsayers look forward to another
restoration of Europe after another twenty years of havoc and
destruction. After urging her to the very edge of the precipice from
which she has only just recovered, breathless and affrighted, they wish
to goad her on once more to the same mad career. The storm is for the
moment over-past, but they will not suffer the vessel of the state to
enter the harbour, in the hope that they may still plunder the wreck,
and prey upon the carcases. The serpent’s hiss, the assassin’s yell, the
mowing and chattering of apes, drown the voice of peace; and Vetus, like
the solemn owl, joins in the distance, and prolongs the dreary note of
death!
ON THE COURIER AND TIMES NEWSPAPERS
_Jan. 21, 1814._
The following passage, among others of the same _calibre_, has lately
appeared in _The Courier_:—
‘The party call upon us to speak out. We thought it not very easy
for any charge of not speaking out to be urged against us. However,
we obey their call most willingly. “Does _The Courier_, they ask,
mean to insinuate, that because the South of France is more inclined
to favour their pretensions, the Bourbons ought to have frigates
allotted them to traverse the Bay of Biscay, and join the standard
of Lord Wellington?” To this we reply, yes; decisively yes!—We say
we would have a Bourbon proceed to the South of France. We hope we
have spoken out on this point. One more remains;—Would we “set up
some new obstacle to the progress of the negociation that is on
foot?” _Yes, if we thought there was any negociation on foot with
Bonaparte. But we trust there is not—we trust there never will be._’
And this at a time when it has been formally signified from the throne
that there was no objection on the part of England to treat with the
French Ruler; when Lord Liverpool has said publicly that no conditions
of peace would be insisted on, which we, placed in the situation of
France, should not think it reasonable to grant; when we, in concert
with the Allies, have announced to France, that it is neither our
intention nor our wish to interfere with their internal government, but
to secure the independence and safety of the continent; and when Lord
Castlereagh has gone from this country for the purpose, avowed and
understood, of giving effect to that declaration, and of fixing the
basis of a peace to be recognized by the common powers of Europe. To
produce such a passage, at such a moment, required that union of
impudence and folly which has no parallel elsewhere. From the quarter
from which it comes, it could not surprize us; it is consistent; it is
in keeping; it is of a piece with the rest. It is worthy of those
harpies of the press, whose business is to scare away the approach of
peace by their obscene and dissonant noises, and to tear asunder the
olive-branch, whenever it is held out to us, with their well-practised
beaks; who fill their hearts with malice, and their mouths with
falsehood; who strive to soothe the dastard passion of their employers
by inflaming those of the multitude; creatures that would sell the lives
of millions for a nod of greatness, and make their country a by-word in
history, to please some punk of quality.
We are to understand from no less an authority than that of _The
Courier_, that Lord Castlereagh is sent out professedly to make peace,
but in reality to hinder it: and we learn from an authority equally
respectable (_The Times_) that nothing can prevent the destruction of
Bonaparte but this country’s untimely consenting to make peace with him.
And yet we are told in the same breath, that the charge of eternal war
which we bring against these writers, is the echo of the French
war-faction, who, at the commencement of every series of hostilities,
and at the conclusion of every treaty, have accused this country of a
want of good faith and sincere disposition to peace. We are told, that
if the French do not force Bonaparte to make peace now, which yet these
writers are determined to prevent him from doing, ‘they are sunk beneath
the worshippers of cats and onions.’ These ‘knavish but keen’
politicians tell the French people in so many words—‘We will not make
peace with your government, and yet, if it does not make peace with us,
we will force what Government we please upon you.’ What effect this
monstrous and palpable insult must have upon the French nation, will
depend upon the degree of sense and spirit they have left among them.
But with respect to ourselves, if the line of policy pointed out by
these juggling fiends is really meant to be pursued, if a pretended
proposal to treat for peace on certain grounds is only to be converted
into an insidious ground of renewed war for other purposes, if this
offensive and unmanly imposture is to be avowed and practised upon us in
the face of day, then we know what will be the duty of Parliament and of
the country. The wars, in which the Governments of Europe have been
engaged, have not succeeded the worse when the people took an effective
share in them. We should hope that the interference of the people will
not be necessary to effect the restoration of peace.
It is curious to hear these systematic opponents of peace, (with
infuriate and insensate looks scattering firebrands and death,) at the
same time affecting the most tender concern for the miseries of war; or
like that good-natured reconciler of differences, _Iago_, hypocritically
shifting the blame from themselves—‘What, stab men in the dark!’ They
ask with grave faces, with _very_ grave faces, ‘Who are the authors, the
propagators, and practisers of this dreadful war system? who the
aggressors? who the unrelenting persecutors of peace?’ War is their
everlasting cry, ‘one note day and night;’ during war, during peace,
during negociation, in success, in adversity; and yet they dare to tax
others as the _sole_ authors of the calamities which they would render
eternal, sooner than abate one jot of their rancorous prejudices. One of
these writers (the Editor of _The Times_) asserts with an air of great
confidence, while he himself is hallooing as loud as he can among the
indefatigable war-pack, that Bonaparte is the cause, the _sole author_
of all the calamities of Europe for the last fourteen years; and what is
remarkable, he brings as a proof of this sweeping assertion, a state
paper, written under the Pitt Administration of _pacific memory_,
deprecating _all_ conciliation with the French at the very period from
which the writer dates the wanton, unprovoked aggressions of Bonaparte,
and which paper he quotes at length, as an admirable description of the
mode by which we are to avert the calamities of Europe for the next
fourteen years, as we have done for the last. Better late than never. So
industrious an inquirer need not despair of effectually averting our
future miseries, and pacifying the world, if it is to be done by
referring back to state papers of this description, or by resuming the
principles of those good old anti-jacobin times, or by finishing the war
as it was begun. There would be no end of precedents and documents for
prosecuting the war with vigour under every variety of circumstances, in
order never to bring it to a conclusion. As a proof of the aggressions
and implacable hatred of France, he might cite that monument of romantic
and disinterested generosity ‘of heroic sentiment and manly enterprise,’
on the part of the Allies, the treaty of Pilnitz.[7] He might proceed to
those pacific manifestations—Lord Hawkesbury’s march to Paris—the
_Bellum internecinum_ of Mr. Windham, and his consistent phrenzy at the
treaty of Amiens—Mr. Pitt’s abstract impossibility of maintaining the
relations of peace and amity with the French Republic, or with the child
and champion of Jacobinism—Mr. Burke’s Regicide Peace—the project of
starving France in 1796—of hurling her down the gulph of bankruptcy in
1797—the coalitions of different periods in which England saved herself
and Europe _from peace_ by her energy, or her example—the contemptuous
rejection of every offer of negociation in every situation, the
unwearied prosecution of the war on the avowed principle that we were
never to leave it off as long as we could carry it on, or get any one to
carry it on for us, or till we had buried ourselves under the ruins of
the civilized world (a prediction which we narrowly escaped
verifying)—all these undeniable proofs and substantial demonstrations of
our fond desires, our longings after peace, and of the determination of
France to aggrandize herself by war and conquest, would, indeed, with
the ingenious glosses of our well-meaning commentator form a very
entertaining volume, and would at least teach us, if not what to follow,
what we ought to shun, in our future advances to this first of earthly
blessings, so long and studiously and systematically withheld from
us—only to render its attainment more certain and more precious!
To the other solid grounds of an indefinite prolongation of this war,
religious, moral, political, commercial, constitutional, continental,
Jacobinical, Revolutionary, Corsican, foreign or domestic—our apologist,
in the true spirit of the French _petit maitre_ in _Roderic Random_, has
now added a ground of his own, of equal efficacy and validity with the
former, viz. that we are to carry it on in the character of gentlemen
and men of honour. We are to fight for the restoration of the Bourbons,
say _The Times_, ‘that we may have gentlemen and men of honour to fight
with.’ There is some prudence in this resolution; it goes on the old
principle, that we are not to fight except with our _match_. Don
Quixote, after he had been soundly drubbed by the Yanguesian carriers,
recollected that he ought not to have engaged with plebeians. The writer
whom we have here quoted, told us, some time ago, from a greater
authority certainly than that of _The Times_, the true grounds of war,
or ‘that we might spill our blood for our country, for our liberty, for
our friends, for our kind;’ but we do not remember, among these
legitimate sources of the waste of human blood, that we were to shed it
for a punctilio. If war were to be decided by the breaking of white and
black sticks among gentlemen-ushers, or even by the effusion of courtly
phrases in _The Courier_ and _The Times_, we should have no objection to
this fastidious refinement; but we cannot consent to shed the best blood
of Europe, nor that of ‘the meanest peasant in this our native land,’ in
order that the delicate honour of the Carlton House Minority may not be
stained, nor the purity of their moral taste perverted, by an
intercourse with any but gentlemen and men of honour. And thou, Carl
John, what hast thou to say to this new plea of the old school?—Or why,
not being clad with the inherent right to ‘monarchize, be feared, and
kill with looks,’—dost thou insult over the King of Denmark, menace
Holstein, and seize upon Norway, and yet tellest thy little son, that
the time is coming, when conquerors shall be no more?—_The Times’_
editor scornfully rejects our practical opinion on the probability of
restoring the Bourbons, because it seems we always reject every
proposition that makes the continuance of war necessary. Be it so. But
do not these persons also attach the highest degree of probability, or,
when they are so inclined, moral certainty, to every thing that tends to
make peace unattainable? It is true we did not, as they say, anticipate
the reverses of the French Emperor before they happened. If we did not
anticipate them before, it was because we had nothing in past experience
to guide us to such a conclusion, except, indeed, the constant
unverified predictions of _The Times_ and _The Courier_. If these
inspired writers had the slightest intimation of them one moment before
they happened, we are willing to bow down to them, and they shall be our
Gods. But of this we are sure, from all experience, that the way to
render the fruits of those reverses uncertain, or to defeat them
altogether, is the very mode of proceeding recommended by the ceaseless
partizans of interminable hostilities. If the French are a nation of
men—if they have the common faculties of memory, of understanding, and
foresight; if they are, as they have been pronounced by one no ways
favourable to them, ‘the most civilized, and with one exception, the
most enlightened people in Europe,’ surely, if any thing can kindle in
their minds ‘the flame of sacred vehemence, and move the very stones to
mutiny,’ it is the letting loose upon them the mohawks of Europe, the
Cossacks, with General Blucher’s manifesto in their hands. It is
restoring to Bonaparte the very weapon which we had wrested from him,
the mighty plea of the independence of nations; it is reclothing his
power with those adamantine scales ‘which fear no discipline of human
hands,’ the hearts and wills of a whole people, threatened with
emasculation of their moral and physical powers, by half a dozen
libellers of the human species, and a horde of barbarians scarcely
human. Even the writer in _The Times_ acknowledges that the Cossacks
entering France as a sort of masters of the ceremonies to the Bourbons,
is only better, and less likely to excite horror and dismay, than their
entering it in their own rights and persons. It may be so. The bear
bringing in the monkey on his back may be more inviting than the bear
alone. But we should think that either portent must be fatal, that
neither hieroglyphic will be favourably interpreted.
ILLUSTRATIONS OF VETUS
‘Those nauseous harlequins in farce may pass,
But there goes more to a substantial ass;
Our modern wits such monstrous fools have shewn,
They seem not of Heaven’s making but their own.’—DRYDEN.
_Dec. 2, 1813._
There is a degree of shameless effrontery which disarms and baffles
contempt by the shock which it gives to every feeling of moral rectitude
or common decency; as there is a daring extravagance in absurdity which
almost challenges our assent by confounding and setting at defiance
every principle of human reasoning. The ribald paragraphs, which fill
the columns of our daily papers, and disgrace the English language,
afford too many examples of the former assertion; the Letters of Vetus
are a striking instance of the latter.
It would have been some satisfaction to us, in the ungrateful task which
we had imposed upon ourselves, if, in combating the conclusions of
Vetus, we could have done justice to the ingenuity of his arguments, or
the force of his illustrations. But his extreme dogmatism is as
destitute of proofs, as it is violent in itself. His profound axioms are
in general flat contradictions; and he scarcely makes a single statement
in support of any proposition which does not subvert it. In the
Parliamentary phrase, he constantly _stultifies_ himself. The glaring
and almost deliberate incongruity of his conclusion is such as to imply
a morbid defect of comprehension, a warped or overstrained
understanding. Absorbed in an inveterate purpose, bent on expanding some
vapid sophism into a cumbrous system, he is insensible to the most
obvious consequences of things; and his reason is made the blind pander
to his prejudices.
We are not converts to this author’s style, any more than to his
reasoning. Indeed the defects of the one very much assist those of the
other, and both have the same character. There is a perpetual effort to
make something out of nothing, and to elevate a common-place into
sublimity. The style of Vetus is not very different from that of Don
Adriano de Armado; every word is as who should say, ‘I am Sir Oracle.’
Like the hero of Cervantes, haranguing the shepherds, he assaults the
very vault of Heaven with the arrogance of his tone, and the loudness of
his pretensions. Nothing can exceed the pompous quaintness, and
laborious foolery of many of his letters. He unfolds the book of fate,
assumes the prophet or historian, by virtue of alliteration and
antithesis;—sustains the balance of power by well-poised periods, or
crushes a people under a ponderous epithet. The set style of Vetus does
not conform easily to the march of human affairs; and he is often forced
to torture the sense to ‘hitch it’ in a metaphor. While he is
marshalling his words, he neglects his arguments, which require all his
attention to connect them together; and in his eagerness to give
additional significance to his sentences, he loses his own meaning.
We shall proceed to the task we at first proposed, viz. that of
supplying marginal notes to the voluminous effusions of Vetus, and shall
continue our comments as often as he furnishes us with the text.
We agree with the sentiment with which he commences his last Letter,
that it is ‘particularly desirable to follow up the question of peace’
at the present crisis, but not with the reason which he assigns for his
extreme anxiety to enter upon the question, ‘because this is just the
moment to dread the entertainment of a pacific overture.’ We can readily
believe that at no other moment than when he dreads its approach, would
Vetus ever breathe a syllable on the subject of peace, and then only to
avert it. Whenever ‘a spurious and mawkish beneficence’ gives an alarm
of peace, the dogs of war stand ready on the slip to hunt it down.
‘I have stated to you’ (_To the Editor of the Times_) ‘as the only
legitimate basis of a treaty, if not on the part of the continental
Allies, at least for England herself, that _she should conquer all she
can, and keep all she conquers_. This is not by way of retaliation,
_however just_, upon so obdurate and rapacious an enemy—but as an
indispensable condition of her own safety and existence.’
That which is here said to be the _only_ legitimate basis of a treaty is
one, which if admitted and acted upon, would make it impossible that any
treaty should ever be formed. It is a basis, not of lasting peace, but
of endless war. To call that the basis of a treaty which precludes the
possibility of any concession or compensation, of every consideration
either of the right or power of each party to retain its actual
acquisitions, is one of those misnomers which the gravity of Vetus’s
manner makes his readers overlook. After the imposing and guarded
exordium which ushers in the definition of our only legitimate basis of
a treaty, we are not prepared to expect Vetus’s burlesque solution of
the difficulty—‘that we are not to treat at all.’ The human mind is
naturally credulous of sounding professions, and reluctantly admits the
existence of what is very common, and common for that reason—_pompous
nonsense_. It seems, however, that this basis of a treaty is to apply
only to one of the contracting powers, namely, England, it is equivocal
as to the Allies, and with respect to France, it is, we suppose, meant
to be altogether null. For in a former letter, after asking, ‘Who are to
be the judges of his (Bonaparte’s) rights?’ he answers emphatically, ‘We
and our Allies!’ Bobadil did not come up to this exquisite pacificator
of the world! To make common sense of Vetus’s axiom with reference to
any state whatever, ‘that it should keep all it conquers,’ it seems
necessary to add this trifling condition, ‘if it can.’ And with respect
to Great Britain in particular, if from her peculiar situation she has
the power to keep all she conquers without being amenable to any other
tribunal than her own will, this very circumstance proves that the
exercise of that power is not _necessary to her safety and existence_.
Again, if England has an interest of her own, quite independent on and
separate from that of the continent, what has she to do with continental
Allies? If her interests may be and are interwoven with those of the
rest of Europe, is it too much to expect from her a common sacrifice to
the common cause? We quarrel with France on continental grounds; we
strip her of her colonies to support the quarrel; and yet we refuse to
restore any part of them, in order to secure peace. If so, we are only
ostensible parties in the contest, and in reality robbers.
‘The first policy of a wise people is to make rival nations afraid to
disturb them, to impress their enemies with a _terrific sense_,’ (how
magnificent is this epic mode of expression) ‘that to attack them is to
suffer not only transient defeats, but deep, grievous, and
_irrecoverable losses_; and to hold in abhorrence any peace which shall
not be a living record of _their own superiority_, and a monument worthy
of those warriors, through whose noble blood it was obtained.’
If the losses sustained in war were to be irrecoverable, it is easy to
foresee that the seat of empires would be very soon changed in almost
all cases whatever. But Vetus here, as is customary with him when it
tends to enforce the hyperbolical effect of his style, assumes as a
broad ground of national wisdom, a physical impossibility. It is not in
the nature of things that the losses of rival States should be
irrecoverable. Vetus would do better to decree at once that the
possessions of nations are _unassailable_ as well as _irrecoverable_,
which would prevent war altogether. But still more preposterous is the
madness or malice of the assertion, that no peace can be made by a wise
nation, which is not a living record of _their own superiority_. ‘This
is the key-stone which makes up the arch’ of Vetus’s indestructible
war-system. Can it have escaped even the short-sighted logic of this
writer, that to make superiority an indispensable condition of a wise
peace is to proscribe peace altogether, because certainly this
superiority cannot belong at the same time to both parties, and yet we
conceive that the consent of both parties is necessary to a peace? Any
other peace, we are told, than that which is at all times impracticable
between rival states, ought not only never to be made, but it ought to
be held in abhorrence, we ought to shudder at its approach as the last
of evils, and throw it to an immeasurable distance from us. This is
indeed closing up the avenues to peace, and shutting the gates of mercy
on mankind, in a most consummate and scientific manner. Our philosophic
rhetorician appears also to forget, in that high tone in which he speaks
of the _monuments raised by the noble blood of warriors_, that these
sort of monuments are cemented by the blood of others as well as by our
own, and tell the survivors a double story. His heated imagination seems
to have been worked up into a literal belief of his own assertion, that
the French nation are a rank non-entity; or he supposes that there is
some celestial ichor in our veins, which we alone shed for our country,
while other nations neither bleed nor suffer from war, nor have a right
to profit by peace. This may be very well in poetry, or on the stage,
but it will not pass current in diplomacy. Vetus, indeed, strains hard
to reconcile inconsistencies, and to found the laws of nations on the
sentiments of exclusive patriotism. But we should think that the common
rules of peace and war, which necessarily involve the rights, interests,
and feelings of different nations, cannot be dictated by the heroic
caprices of a few hair-brained egotists, on either side of the question.
ILLUSTRATIONS OF VETUS
(CONTINUED)
‘He is indeed a person of great acquired follies.’
SIR FOPLING FLUTTER
_Dec. 10, 1813._
‘Nothing,’ continues Vetus, ‘can be more opposite to this great policy,
than to fight and to render back the fruits of our successes. We may be
assured, that those with whom we contend are ready enough to improve
_their_ victories. If we are not equally so, _we shall never be at
rest_. If the enemy beats us, he wins our provinces.—[_What provinces of
ours?_]—If we beat him, we restore all. What more profitable game could
he desire! Truly, at this rate, our neighbours must be arrant fools if
they leave us one week’s repose!’
There is a spirit of Machiavelian policy in this paragraph which is very
commendable. It reminds us of the satirist’s description of ‘fools
aspiring to be knaves.’ It is, in fact, this fear of being outwitted by
the French, that constantly makes us the dupes of our suspicions of
them, as it is a want of confidence in our own strength or firmness,
that leads us to shew our courage by defiance. True courage, as well as
true wisdom, is not distrustful of itself. Vetus recommends it to us to
act upon the maxims of the common disturbers of mankind, of ‘this
obdurate and rapacious foe,’ as the only means to secure general
tranquillity. He wishes to embody the pretended spirit and principles of
French diplomacy in a code,—the acknowledged basis of which should be
either universal conquest, or endless hostility. We have, it seems, no
chance of repelling the aggressions of the French, but by retaliating
them not only on themselves, but on other states. At least, the author
gives a pretty broad hint of what he means by the improvement of _our_
victories, when he talks of annexing Holland and Danish Zealand to
Hanover, as ‘her natural prey,’ _instead_ of their being the
dependencies of France. This is certainly one way of trimming the
balance of power in Europe, and placing the independence of nations in a
most happy dilemma. The inventor of this new and short way with foreign
states only laments that Hanover, ‘under British auspices,’ has not been
before-hand with France in imitating Prussia in her seizure of the
Austrian province on one side, and her partition of Poland on the other.
He can scarcely express his astonishment and regret, that Holland and
Denmark should so long have escaped falling into our grasp, after the
brilliant example of ‘rapacity and obduracy’ set to our phlegmatic,
plodding, insipid, _commercial_ spirit by Prussia and Russia. But now
that we have rescued ‘our natural prey’ from the French, it is to be
hoped, that we shall make sure of it. Vetus’s great principles of
morality seem to be borrowed from those of Peachum, and his
acknowledgements of merit to flow much in the same channel:—‘A good
clever lad, this Nimming Ned—there’s not a handier in the whole gang,
nor one more industrious to save goods from the fire!’—His chief
objection to that ‘revolutionist,’ Bonaparte, (Vetus too is a projector
of revolutions) is not, evidently, to his being a robber, but because he
is at the head of a different gang; and we are only required to bestir
ourselves as effectually as he does, _for the good of mankind_! But
Vetus, whose real defect is a contraction of intellectual vision, sees
no alternative between this rapacious and obdurate policy, and
unconditional submission, between ‘restoring all’ or none. This is not
sound logic. He wishes by a _coup sur_ to prevent an unfair and
dishonourable peace, by laying down such rules as must make peace
impossible, under any circumstances, or on any grounds that can enter
into human calculation. According to him, our only security against the
most wild and extravagant concessions, is the obstinate determination to
make none; our only defence against the fascinations of our own folly,
is to take refuge from the exercise of our discretion in his impregnable
paradoxes.—‘The same argument which goes to justify a war, prescribes
war measures of the most determined and active character.’ Good; because
the nature and essence of war is _a trial of strength_; and, therefore,
to make it as advantageous to ourselves as possible, we ought to exert
all the strength that we possess. ‘The very object,’ continues Vetus,
‘that of weakening the enemy, for which we pursue those vigorous
measures, and strip him of his possessions, renders it _necessary_ to
keep him in that state of weakness by which he will be deterred from
repeating his attack; and, _therefore, to hold inflexibly_ what we have
acquired.’ Here again Vetus confounds himself, and, involving a plain
principle in the mazes of a period, represents war not as a trial of
strength between contending states, each exerting himself to the utmost,
but as a voluntary assumption of superiority on the part of one of them.
He talks of stripping the enemy of his possessions, and holding them
inflexibly—as matters of course, as questions of will, and not of power.
It is neither the actual possession, nor _the will_ to keep certain
acquisitions, but the _power_ to keep them, and, _at the same time_, to
extort other concessions from an enemy, that must determine the basis of
all negociations, that are not founded on verbal chimeras.
‘We are taught, indeed, to take for granted, that a peace, whose
conditions bear hard on either party, will be the sooner broken by that
party; and, therefore, that we have an indirect interest in sacrificing
a portion of our conquests.’ The general principle here stated is
self-evident, and one would think indisputable. For the very ground of
war is a peace whose conditions are thought to _bear hard_ on one of the
parties, and yet, according to Vetus, the only way to make peace
durable, to prevent the recurrence of an appeal to force, is to impose
such hard conditions on an enemy, as it is his interest, and must be his
inclination, to break _by force_. An opinion of the disproportion
between our general strength, and our actual advantages, seems to be the
necessary ground of war, but it is here converted into the permanent
source of peace. The origin of the common prejudice is, however, very
satisfactorily illustrated in the remainder of the paragraph. ‘This
language is in favour with the two extremes of English faction. The
blind opponents of every minister _who happens to be engaged in
conducting a war_’ [_Is war then a mere affair of accident?_] ‘can see
no danger in national dishonour; and cry out for peace with double
vehemence, whenever it is least likely to be concluded well. The
dependents, on the other hand, of any feeble government, will strive to
lower the expectations of the country—to exclaim against _immoderate_
exertion—to depreciate her powers in war, and her pretensions at a
peace:—thus preparing an oblique defence for their employers, and
undermining the honest disappointment’ [_Quere expectations_] ‘of the
people when they reflect how little has been done by war, and how much’
[of that little] ‘undone by negociation. But besides being a factious
expedient, it is a principle of action equally false and absurd. I deny
that we affect any thing more by granting an enemy what are _called
favourable terms_, than convince him that he may go to war with England,
gratis. The conditions he obtains will encourage him to try the chance
of another war, in the hope of a still more advantageous treaty.’ Here
Vetus entirely shifts the state of the question. The terms of a peace,
if _not hard_, must be immediately _favourable_! Because we grant an
enemy such terms as he has a right to expect, it is made a conclusion
that we are also to grant him such as he has no right to expect, and
which will be so decidedly advantageous as to induce him to try his
fortune still farther against so generous an adversary. That is, Vetus
has no idea of the possibility of a just, fair, or honourable peace; his
mind refuses to dwell for a moment on any arrangement of terms, which,
by bearing hard on one party or another, will not be sure to end
speedily, from the desire on one side to retrieve its affairs, and on
the other to improve its advantages, in a renewal of war. ‘The only
valid security for peace is the accession to our own strength, and the
diminution of our rival’s, by the resources and dominions we have
wrested from him.’ First, this security can be good only on one side:
secondly, it is not good at all: the only security for peace is not in
the actual losses or distresses incurred by states, but in the settled
conviction that they cannot _better_ themselves by war. But all these
contradictions are nothing to Vetus, who alone does not fluctuate
between the extremes of faction, but is still true to war—and himself.
But there is, in our opinion, a third extreme of English faction (if
Vetus will spare us the anomaly) not less absurd, and more mischievous
than either of the others: we mean those who are the blind adherents of
every minister who happens to be engaged in a war, however unnecessarily
or wantonly it may have been begun, or however weakly and wickedly
carried on: who see no danger in repeated disgraces, and impending ruin,
provided we are obstinately bent on pursuing the same dreadful career
which has led to them; who, when our losses come thronging in upon us,
urge us to persist till we recover the advantages we have lost, and,
when we recover them, force us on till we lose all again: with whom
peace, in a time of adverse fortune, is dishonour, and in the pride of
success, madness: who only exaggerate ‘our pretensions at a peace,’ that
they may never be complied with: who assume a settled unrelenting
purpose in our adversary to destroy us, in order to inspire us with the
same principle of never-ending hostility against him: who leave us no
alternative but eternal war, or inevitable ruin: who irritate the hatred
and the fears of both parties, by spreading abroad incessantly a spirit
of defiance, suspicion, and the most galling contempt: who, adapting
every aspect of affairs to their own purposes, constantly return in the
same circle to the point from which they set out: with whom peace is
always unattainable, war always necessary!
We shall pass over Vetus’s historic researches, the wars of the Romans
and Carthaginians (the formal latitude of Vetus’s pen delights in these
great divisions of human affairs), and come to what is more to our
purpose.
In modern times he first comes to the treaty of 1763, only (as far as we
can find) to affix the epithet ‘American rebels’ as a sort of Pragmatic
Sanction to our colonists, with whom, he says, France joined a few years
afterwards, and, ‘in spite of her ruined finances and her peaceful king,
aimed a mortal blow at the British monarchy.’ Yet, notwithstanding this
long-standing and inveterate animosity of the French court to this
country, we find the same France, in the next paragraph but one,
stigmatized as _republican_ and _Corsican_, ‘with centric and eccentric
scribbled o’er,’ as if these were important distinctions, though Vetus
himself ‘would prefer for France the scourge of Bonaparte, to the
_healthier_, and to England _not less hostile_, sovereignty of the
banished house of Bourbon.’ Why then pertinaciously affix these
obnoxious epithets? They are bad ornaments of style—they are worse
interpreters of truth.
To prove his general axiom, that in order to be stable, ‘the conditions
of peace must bear hard on one of the parties,’ Vetus asks, ‘Were the
powers that partitioned unhappy Poland so conciliated by her
acquiescence in their first encroachments, as to abstain from offering
her any second wrong?’ Now this is an instance precisely in point to
prove the direct reverse of Vetus’s doctrine: for here was a treaty in
which the terms bore exceedingly hard on one of the parties, and yet
this only led to accumulated wrongs by a renewal of war. We say that
hard conditions of peace, in all cases, will lead to a rupture. If the
parties are nearly equal, they will lead to resistance to unfounded
claims; if quite unequal—to an aggravation of oppression. But would
Russia and Prussia have been more lenient or deterred from their
encroachments, if Poland had pretended to impose hard conditions of
peace on them? These governments partitioned Poland, not in consequence
of any treaty good or bad, but because they had the will and the power
to do so. Vetus would terrify the French into moderation by hard
conditions of peace, and yet he supposes us to be in the same relation
to France as Poland to its implacable enemies.
‘Did the wretched complaisance of the leading continental courts in
their several treaties with France, ensure their tranquillity even for a
moment?’ This is still altering the record. The question is not about
submitting to hard conditions, but about imposing them. Besides, ‘the
aggravated and multiplied molestations, injuries, and insults, which
these courts were doomed to suffer,’ might be accounted for from those
which they had in vain attempted to inflict on France, and from their
still more wretched complaisance in being made the tools of a court
which was not continental.
‘Then comes the peace of Amiens, our peace of Amiens—a peace born,
educated, nourished, and matured in this very philanthropic spirit of
gentleness and forgiveness. In the war which preceded _the truce_ of
which I am speaking, _the French government_ involved _us_ in
considerably more than two hundred millions of debt.’ Vetus then
proceeds to state that we made peace without any liquidation of this
claim, without satisfaction, without a bond, (_what else?_) without a
promise, without a single guinea! ‘I will have ransom, most egregious
ransom.’ Why was it ever heard of that one government paid the debts in
which another had involved itself in making war upon it?
‘The language of England,’ says our author, ‘was correctly what
follows:—You, Monsieur, have loaded _me_ with unspeakable distresses and
embarrassments,’ (_all this while, be it recollected, our affairs were
going on most prosperously and gloriously in the cant of The Times_)
‘you have robbed me of half my fortune, and reduced me to the brink of
beggary,’ (_the French by all accounts were in the gulph of bankruptcy_)
‘you have torn away and made slaves of my friends and kindred,’
(_indeed_) ‘you have dangerously wounded me, and murdered my beloved
children, who armed to defend their parent.’—This is too much, even for
the dupes of England. Stick, Vetus, to your statistics, and do not make
the pathetic ridiculous! Sophistry and affectation may confound common
sense to a certain degree, but there is a point at which our feelings
revolt against them.
We have already remarked on what Vetus says of Hanover; he probably will
not wish us to go farther into it. Of Bonaparte he says, of course, that
nothing short of unconditional submission will ever satisfy that
revolutionist, and that he will convert the smallest concession made to
him into a weapon for our destruction. That is, we have it in our power
to set him at defiance, to insult him, to ‘bring him to the block,’
etc., whenever we please; and yet we are so completely in his power, so
dependent on him, that the smallest concession must be fatal to us, will
be made the instrument of our inevitable destruction. Thus is the public
mind agitated and distracted by incredible contradictions, and made to
feel at once ‘the fierce extremes’ of terror and triumph, of rashness
and despair. ‘Our safety lies in his weakness, not in his will.’ If so,
or if it depends on either of the conditions here stated, we are in no
very pleasant situation. But our real safety depends on our own
strength, and steady reliance on it, and not on the arguments of Vetus.
ILLUSTRATIONS OF VETUS
(CONTINUED)
‘Madmen’s epistles are no gospels.’
_Dec. 16, 1813._
The last Letter of Vetus begins with an allusion to the events which
have lately taken place in Holland. He then proceeds—‘What final effect
this popular movement by the Dutch may have upon the future interests
and prosperity of England is a question to be discussed with deliberate
caution—with extreme solicitude—and with the chance, I trust, the
distant chance, of its conducting us to no very gratifying conclusion!’
There is something in this passage truly characteristic, and well worthy
of our notice. Vetus is, it seems, already jealous of the Dutch. The
subtle venom of his officious zeal is instantly put in motion by the
prospect of their national independence and commercial prosperity; and
his pen is, no doubt, prepared, on the slightest provocation of
circumstances, to convert them from an ally to be saved, into a rival
and an enemy to be crushed. He, however, waives for the present the
solemn discussion, till he can find some farther grounds to confirm him
in his extreme solicitude and mysterious apprehensions. The perverse
readiness of Vetus to pick a quarrel out of everything, or out of
nothing, is exactly described in Spenser’s Allegory of _Furor_ and
_Occasion_, which if we thought him ‘made of penetrable stuff,’ we would
recommend to his perusal.
The introductory comment on the Revolution in Holland is a clue to the
whole of our author’s political system, which we shall here endeavour to
explain. He looks askance with ‘leer malign’ on the remotest prospect of
good to other nations. Every addition to the general stock of liberty or
happiness, is to him so much taken from our own. He sees nothing
gratifying in that prosperity or independence, which is shared (or any
part of it) with foreign nations. He trembles with needless apprehension
at the advantages in store for them, which he anticipates only to
prevent, and is indifferent to our own welfare, interests, honour—except
as they result from the privations, distress, and degradation of the
rest of the world. Hatred, suspicion, and contempt for other nations are
the first and last principles of the love which ‘an upright Englishman’
bears to his country. To prevent their enjoying a moment’s repose, or
indulging even in a dream of future comfort, he would involve his own
country in incessant distraction and wretchedness, and risk its final
ruin on the cast of a die!—Vetus professes, with some reason, not to be
enamoured of quotation: but he may, perhaps, allow us to refer to an
author, who, though not so deep read in Vattel and the writings of the
jurists, had just and penetrating views of human nature. ‘Think, there’s
livers out of England. What’s England in the world’s map? In a great
pool a swan’s nest.’ Now this ‘swan’s nest’ is indeed to us more than
all the world besides—to cherish, to protect, to love, and honour it.
But if we expect it to be so to the rest of the world—if we do not allow
them to cultivate their own affections, to improve their own advantages,
to respect their own rights, to maintain their own independence—if in
the blindness of our ignorance, our pride, and our presumption, we think
of setting up our partial and local attachments as the law of nature and
nations—if we practise, or so much as tolerate in theory that ‘exclusive
patriotism’ which is inconsistent with the common privileges of
humanity, and attempt to dictate our individual caprices, as paramount
and binding obligations on those, to whose exaction of the same claims
from us we should return only loud scorn, indignation, and defiance—if
we are ever so lost to reason, as Vetus would have us, who supposes that
we cannot serve our country truly and faithfully but by making others
the vassals of her avarice or insolence; we shall then indeed richly
deserve, if we do not meet with, the natural punishment of such
disgraceful and drivelling hypocrisy.
Vetus, who is extremely dissatisfied with our application of the term
‘exclusive patriotism’ to him, is nevertheless ‘at a loss to understand
the patriotism which is not exclusive. The word _implies_ a preference
of the rights and welfare of our own country to those of other (and
above all other) of rival countries. This is not indeed the philanthropy
of Anacharsis Cloots—it is not the dreary jargon of metaphysics, nor the
shop-boy philosophy of a printer’s devil—nor the _sans-culotterie_ of
scholastic virtue.’ We will tell Vetus what we mean by exclusive
patriotism, such as (we say) his is. We mean by it then, not that
patriotism which implies a preference of the rights and welfare of our
own country, but that which professes to annihilate and proscribe the
rights of others—not that patriotism which supposes us to be the
creatures of circumstance, habit, and affection, but that which divests
us of the character of reasonable beings—which fantastically makes our
interests or prejudices the sole measure of right and wrong to other
nations, and constitutes us sole arbiters of the empire of the world—in
short, which, under the affectation of an overweening anxiety for the
welfare of our own country, _excludes_ even the shadow of a pretension
to common sense, justice, and humanity. It is this wretched solecism
which Vetus would fain bolster up into a system, with all the logic and
rhetoric he is master of. It is true, this kind of patriotism is not the
philanthropy of Anacharsis Cloots; it has nothing to do with
philanthropy in any shape, but it is a vile compound of ‘the jargon of
metaphysics, with the vulgar notions of a printer’s devil.’ It is an
intense union of the grossness and narrowness of ignorance with the
dangerous refinement of the most abstracted speculation. It is passion
and prejudice, inflamed by philosophy, and philosophy distorted by
passion and prejudice.
Alter his cold exordium on the Revolution in Holland, our consistent
politician enters with warmth on Lord Castlereagh’s speech on the
subsidiary treaties, in which he finds a _But_ before the word _Peace_,
which has a most happy efficacy in healing the wounds inflicted on his
tortured apprehensions, by the explicit, unqualified declaration of Lord
Liverpool in the other House. ‘After describing the laudable solicitude
of Ministers for the attainment of that _first_ of earthly goods,
peace,’ (we thought it had ranked last in the mind of Vetus) ‘his
Lordship added _what was worth all the rest_—BUT we must have a _secure_
peace. We must not only recollect with whom we contend, but with whom we
negociate, and never grant to _such_ an enemy conditions, which under
the name of peace, would disarm this nation, and expose her to
_contingent_ dangers.’ (To place any nation out of the reach of
contingent dangers in peace or war is, we imagine, an undertaking beyond
even the _calibre_ of Lord Castlereagh’s talents as a statesman.)
‘These,’ proceeds Vetus, ‘were nearly the words; they certainly do not
compromise his meaning.’ (Our author cannot be much mistaken in
attributing to his Lordship any words which seeming to have some
meaning, in reality have none.) ’ Here then the noble Secretary has
_chased away every doubtful expression_ of his colleague.’ (‘Why
so,—this horrible shadow’ of peace ‘being gone,’ Vetus ‘is himself
again.’)
‘The sentiment delivered by the sovereign on the throne is now given to
us with a construction, at which we need no longer be alarmed. _I_ ask
only that _secure_ peace,—a peace consistent with English safety—_void
of the shadow of regard or indulgence to the pretensions and honour,
otherwise the ambition and arrogance of Bonaparte_, which, as compared
with _the relief of one day’s hunger to the meanest peasant in this our
native land_, are baubles not worth a name!’—This is undoubtedly one of
the most remarkable specimens we ever met with of that figure in
rhetoric, designated by an excellent writer as ‘the figure of
_encroachment_.’[8] Vetus, by a series of equations (certainly not
mathematical ones) at length arrives at a construction of peace at which
he is no longer alarmed; at the identical peace which he wants, and the
only one he will admit,—a peace preposterous in its very terms, and in
its nature impracticable,—a peace ‘void of the shadow of regard or
indulgence to the pretensions and honour’ of the enemy, which are to
pass with them as well as with us, for so much ‘arrogance and ambition.’
This is the only peace consistent with English safety—this is the secure
peace of Lord Castlereagh—the fair and honourable peace announced from
the throne—the very peace which Lord Liverpool meant to describe when he
startled Vetus by the doubtful expression of a peace ‘consistent with
the honour, rights, and interests of France’—‘of such a peace as we in
her situation should be disposed to grant.’ To the mind of Vetus, which
is indeed the very receptacle for contradictions ‘to knot and gender
in,’ these two sorts of peace appear to be perfectly compatible, and the
one a most happy explanation of the other, viz. a peace void of every
shadow of regard to the rights and honour of a rival nation, and a peace
consistent with those rights and that honour. If this is not ‘mere
midsummer madness,’ we do not know what is. Or if any thing can surpass
it (‘for in this lowest deep of absurdity a lower deep still opens to
receive us, gaping wide’) it is the forlorn piece of sentimental mummery
by which it is attempted to protract this endless war of proscription
against the pretensions of France, under the mask of relieving the wants
and distresses of the meanest peasant of this our native land! Compared
with the tears and blood of our countrymen, all the sophistries of Vetus
by which he would make them victims of his own vanity and egotism, not
less than of the arrogance and ambition of Bonaparte, are indeed
contemptible and mischievous baubles.
‘What means the impious cry raised by degenerate Englishmen against the
mere chance—nay, the remotest possibility of a peace, whose terms should
be honourable to their country? Whence arises this profligate and
abandoned yell with which these traitors insult us? _Are they still in
pay? Is their patron still rich enough to bribe them?_ When we demand
compensation for our _dreadful sufferings_, it is but what justice
grants. When we call for security, it is what our existence requires.
Yet, when these undoubted rights and essential safeguards of an injured
people are asserted, it is nothing less than blaspheming the holy
supremacy of Bonaparte!’
First, when Vetus demands compensation for our sufferings, it would
perhaps hardly be sufficient to refer him to the satisfaction which the
patriotic contributors to _The Times_, _The Courier_, _The Morning
Post_, _The Sun_, and _The Star_, must have had in writing, and their
admirers in reading the daily paragraphs, of which those sufferings were
the dreadful price, and the inevitable result. When we demand
compensation for what we have suffered, it is but _justice_, if we can
at the same time make compensation for what we have made others suffer;
but at all events, it is no compensation for past sufferings, to make
them perpetual. When we call for security, we are right; but when we
tell the enemy that our only security is in his destruction, and call
upon him for this pledge and safeguard of our undoubted rights, we shew,
by asking for what we know we cannot have, that not security, but
defiance is our object. As to the terms of abuse which are introduced in
this paragraph (we suppose, to vary the general gravity and decorum of
Vetus’s style) we shall answer them by a very short statement of what we
conceive to be the truth. Europe has been for the last twenty years
engaged in a desperate and (for some reason or other) an unequal
struggle against France;—by playing at double or quits, she has just
recovered from the very brink of destruction; and the keepers of our
political E.O. tables treat us as traitors and miscreants, who would
dissuade her from sitting down once more to finish the game, and ruin
her adversary.
‘—It is asked,—“Do we propose to humble France? Do we propose to destroy
her? If so, we breathe _eternal_ war; if so, we convert the aggressor
into the sufferer, and transfer all the dignity and authority of justice
to the enemy against whom we arm!”’ Yes, against whom we arm for the
avowed purpose of his destruction. From the moment that we make the
destruction of an enemy (be he who he may) the indispensable condition
of our safety, our destruction from that moment _becomes_ necessary to
his, and an act of self-defence. Not much liking this dilemma from which
our author has more than once ‘struggled to get free,’ he in the next
passage makes a wide career indeed, in order, no doubt, to return to the
charge with better effect hereafter. ‘The question of peace or eternal
war is not a _naked question_ of right and wrong. It is a question,
whose morality is determined by its reference to our preservation as a
people. To such interrogatories I answer without reserve, that we ought
to exact _precisely_ that measure of humiliation from France, and that
we do recommend _that critical advance towards her destruction_, that
may combine the utmost _attainable_ satisfaction for our past grievances
with a solid protection to our future interest and welfare. From France,
since the _fatal_ battle of Hastings, what has _this nation of Saxon
warriors_’—(We hardly know ourselves in the learned livery of Vetus’s
style. He himself is doubtless descended from some very old family
settled here before the Conquest)—‘What has this nation of Saxon
warriors ever yet endured from France but injury and affliction?’ Yet we
have made a shift to exist as a nation under all this load of calamity.
We still breathe and live notwithstanding some intervals of repose, some
short resting places afforded us, before this morbid inspector of
health, like another Doctor Pedro Positive, injoined his preposterous
regimen of incessant war as necessary to lasting peace, and to our
preservation as a people!
‘Modern France’ continues Vetus, rising in his argument, has no
principle so deeply rooted as that of everlasting enmity to England. ‘I
confess for this reason that in my uncorrupted judgment _the best
security_ for Great Britain, and therefore, _if practicable, her most
imperious duty_, would be _the absolute conquest of France_. But since
that, _unfortunately_, is an event which _at present_ we are not likely
to accomplish, _the second best security_ is’ (one would think not to
attempt it at all; no, but) ‘to reduce her, _if we can_, to a degree of
weakness consistent _with our immediate repose_.’ After thus modestly
postponing the absolute conquest of France to a more convenient
opportunity, he adds the following incredible sentence. ‘If the enemy
should be so far borne away by _his hatred_, as to command _his
emissaries_ in London to announce that he prefers waging eternal war to
the acceptance of conditions, which _his own persevering and atrocious
outrages_ have rendered in the mind of every Englishman indispensable to
the safety of these islands, the woeful alternative of perpetual war
very plainly originates not with Great Britain but with Bonaparte!’ That
is to say, _The Times_ not long ago laid it down as a fixed, unalterable
maxim, without reference to terms of one sort or another, that we were
never to make peace with Bonaparte; Vetus in this very letter enters
into an elaborate apology, for that multitude of wise, honest, and
virtuous persons who think his existence as a sovereign _at all times_
threatens our existence as a nation, and it is because we entered our
protest against this ‘frantic outcry raised by degenerate Englishmen,’
that Bonaparte is here made to charge his emissaries in London to
announce that he prefers eternal war to the acceptance of conditions,
the moderation of which conditions or of _our second best security_ may
be judged of when we are told that the best, and indeed only real
security for Great Britain, and therefore her most imperious duty, would
be the absolute conquest of France. Vetus is, however, contented with
such terms of peace as will imply only a _critical advance to her
destruction_, and if Bonaparte is not contented with the same terms, the
alternative of eternal war, it seems, originates with him and not with
Vetus.[9]
But we deny that though this best security for Great Britain, the
absolute conquest of France, were in her power, that it would be her
most imperious duty to effect it. And we deny it, because on the same
ground a better security still for Great Britain would be the conquest
or destruction of Europe and the world; and yet we do not think it her
imperious duty, even if she could, to accomplish the one, or to make a
_critical_ advance to the other. For if it is once laid down and acted
upon as a maxim in national morality, that the best and most desirable
security of a state is in the destruction of its neighbours, or that
there is to be an unrelenting ever watchful critical approximation to
this object as far as possible, there is an end of civil society. The
same principle of not stopping short of this _maximum_ of selfish
security will impose the same imperious duty of rankling jealousy, and
inexorable hostility on others. Our speculator’s ‘best possible
security’ for the independence of states, is nothing but a watchword for
mutual havoc, and wide-spreading desolation. Terrified with the phantom
of imaginary danger, he would have us rush headlong on the reality. We
are obstinately to refuse the enjoyment of a moment’s repose, and
proceed to commit wilful dilapidation on the estate of our happiness,
because it is not secured to us by an everlasting tenure. Placed at the
mercy of the malice or hypocrisy of every venal alarmist, our only
resource must be to seek a refuge from our fears in our own destruction,
or to find the gratification of our revenge in that of others. But a
whole nation is no more justified in obtaining this best of all possible
securities for itself, by the immediate subversion of other states, than
the assassin is justified in taking the life of another, to prevent the
possibility of any future attempt upon his own. For in proportion as a
state is weak and incapable of subjugating us, is the manifest injustice
of any such precaution;—and in proportion as a state is formidable, and
likely to excite serious apprehension for our own safety, is the danger
and folly of setting an example which may be retaliated with so much
greater effect, and ‘like a devilish engine, recoil upon ourselves.’
That exclusive patriotism which claims for our country an exemption from
‘contingent danger,’ which would place its wealth, its power, or even
its safety beyond the reach of chance and the fluctuation of human
affairs, claims for it an exemption from the common lot of human nature.
That exclusive patriotism which seeks to enforce this claim (equally
impious and unwise) by the absolute conquest of rival states, tempts the
very ruin it professes to avert.
But Vetus mistakes the nature of patriotism altogether. He would
transform that principle which was intended for the tutelary genius of
nations, into the destroying demon of the world. He ransacks past
history to revive old grudges; he anticipates the future to invent new
ones. In his whole system, there is not room for ‘so small a drop of
pity as a wren’s eye.’ His patriotism is the worm that dies not; a viper
gnawing at the heart. He would strip this feeling of everything but the
low cunning, and brutal ferocity of the savage state, and then arm it
with all the refinements of scholastic virtue, and the most rigid logic.
The diverging rays of human reason which should be diffused to cheer and
enlighten the moral world, are in him collected into a focus of raging
zeal to burn and destroy. It is well for mankind that in the order of
the universe, our passions naturally circumscribe themselves, and
contain their own antidote within them. The only justification of our
narrow, selfish passions, is their short-sightedness:—were it not for
this, the jealousies of individuals and of nations would not leave them
the smallest interval of rest. It is well that the ungovernable impulses
of fear and hatred are excited only by gross, palpable objects; and are
therefore transient, and limited in their operation. It is well that
those motives which do not owe their birth to reason, should not
afterwards receive their nourishment and support from it. If in their
present desultory state, they produce so many mischiefs, what would be
the case, if they were to be organized into systems, and elevated into
abstract principles of right and wrong?
The whole of Vetus’s reasoning is founded on the false notions of
patriotism which we have here pointed out, and which we conceive to be
totally inconsistent with ‘the just principles of negociation.’ The
remainder of his letter, which unfolds his motives for a pacific
arrangement with Bonaparte, is founded entirely on the same jaundiced
and distempered views. Many wise, many honest, many virtuous persons, he
says, have maintained, not without reason, ‘the incompetency of _this
Corsican_ under any circumstances to discharge the obligations of a
state of peace.’ But he, more wise, more honest, more virtuous, sees a
hope, a shadow of peace, rising like a cloudy speck out of a quarter
where it was least expected. ‘The stone which the builders rejected, is
become the corner-stone of his Temple of Peace.’—‘It does not appear to
Vetus, that a peace with Bonaparte is now unattainable on terms
sufficient for our safety.’ He thinks there is no man so proper to make
peace with as this Corsican, this Revolutionist,—no one so proper to
govern France—to the complete exclusion of the Bourbons, whose
pretensions he scouts analytically, logically, and chronologically, and
who, it seems, had always the same implacable animosity against this
country as Bonaparte, _without a tythe of his ability_. [Surely this
circumstance might plead a little in their favour with Vetus.] And why
so? Whence arises this unexpected partiality shewn to Bonaparte? Why it
is ‘from the strong conviction that by no other means so decisive as the
existence of this man, with his consuming, depressing and degrading
system of government, can we hope to see France _crushed and ground down
below the capacity of contending for ages to come_ with the force of the
British Empire, _moved by the spirit of freedom_! Regarding France under
every known form of government as the irreconcileable foe of England, _I
have beheld with almost unmingled joy the growth and accumulation of
this savage despotism_!’ To be sure ‘while there appeared to some
persons,’ [Vetus was not one of them] ‘a _chance_ of his enslaving the
Continent, and hurling the mass of subjugated nations against our
shores—then, indeed, those who entertained such fears were justified in
seeking his _personal_ and political destruction. But once released from
the terror of his arm, _what genuine Englishman_ can fail to rejoice in
the privilege of consigning Bonaparte and the French people, for better
for worse, to the paradise of each other’s embraces?’ Vetus then
proceeds to inveigh at great length against the persons and pretensions
of the Bourbons. Leaving them to the mercy of this good-natured
remembrancer, we shall only observe, that he decides the impolicy of
restoring the Bourbons, by asking, whether their restoration would not
be advantageous to France, and consequently (he infers very consistently
with himself) _injurious to this country_. Looking forward but half a
century, he sees France gradually regain under the old regime ‘her
natural ascendancy over Great Britain, from which she falls, and must
fall every hour more rapidly from the necessary operation of those
principles on which the Corsican dynasty is founded.’ Nay, looking on
farther than the expiration of the same half century, he sees ‘sloth,
weakness, and poverty, worse than ever sprung from Turkish policy,
proceeding from this odious, self-dissolving power, and a gulph of
irretrievable destruction, already yawning for our eternal foe.’
It is not long ago since Vetus drew an historical parallel between this
country and Carthage, encouraging us to expect the same fate from France
which Carthage received from Rome, and to act upon this fanciful
comparison as a solid ground of wisdom. Now all at once ‘this mendicant
in argument, this perfect juggler in politics,’ inverts the perspective,
takes a prophetic view of the events of the next fifty years, and France
is seen dwindling into another Turkey, which the genius of British
freedom grinds to powder, and crushes beneath her feet! These great
statesmen-like views of things, ‘this large discourse of reason, looking
before and after,’ are, we confess, beyond us. We recollect indeed a
similar prophecy to that of Vetus, couched in nearly the same terms,
when in the year 1797, the French were said to be ‘on the verge, nay, in
the very gulph of bankruptcy,’ and that their finances could not hold
out six months longer. Vetus however, taught by the failure of past
prognostics, constructs his political calculations for the ensuing
century, instead of the ensuing year, and puts off the day of reckoning
to a period when he and his predictions will be forgotten.
Such are the charitable grounds on which our author wishes to secure
Bonaparte on the throne of France, and thinks that peace may at present
be made with him, on terms consistent with our safety. He is not, like
others, ‘ready to shake hands with the Usurper over the tomb of the
murdered D’Enghien, provided he will _return to the paths of religion
and virtue_;’ but he will shake hands with him over the ruins of the
liberty and happiness of France, on the express condition that ‘he never
returns to the paths of religion and morality.’ Vetus is willing to
forget the injuries which Bonaparte may have done to England, for the
sake of the greater mischiefs he may do to France. These are the
‘obligations’ which Vetus owes to him—this the source of his gratitude,
the sacred pledge that reconciles him to ‘that monster whom England
detests.’ He is for making peace with the ‘tyrant,’ to give him an
opportunity to rivet on the chains of France, and fix her final doom.
But is Vetus sincere in all this? His reasoning comes in a very
questionable shape; and we the more doubt it, because he has no sooner
(under the auspices of Bonaparte) hurled France down the gulf of
irretrievable destruction, than he immediately resumes the old topic of
eternal war or perpetual bondage, as the only alternative which this
country can look to. Why, if he is in earnest, insist with Lord
Castlereagh on the caution with which we must grant terms to ‘such an
enemy,’ to this disabled and paralyzed foe? Why assert, as Vetus did in
his very last letter, that ‘nothing short of unconditional submission
will ever satisfy that revolutionist, and that any concession made to
him will be instantly converted into a weapon for our destruction?’ Why
not grant to him such terms as might be granted to the Bourbons, since
they would be granted to a much less dangerous and powerful rival? Why
not subsist, as we have hitherto done, without the fear of perpetual war
or perpetual bondage before our eyes, now that the crown of France has
lost its original brightness, and is shorn of those beams which would
again sparkle round it, if fixed on the head of a Bourbon? We suspect
that our author is not quite in earnest in his professions, because he
is not consistent with himself. Is it possible that his anxiety to keep
out the Bourbons arises from his fear that peace might creep in with
them, at least as a sort of compliment of the season? Is our veteran
politician aware, in his own mind, that the single epithets, Corsican,
republican, revolutionary, will have more effect in stirring up the
embers of war, than all the arguments which he might use to demonstrate
the accumulating dangers to be apprehended from the mild paternal sway
of the ancient dynasty?
We cannot help saying, however, that we think the elaborate attempt of
Vetus to prove the necessary extinction of the power of France under the
government of Bonaparte, a total failure. What is the amount of his
argument? That in a period when the French were to owe their existence
and their power to war, Bonaparte has made them a warlike people, and
that they did not sit down quietly to ‘the cultivation of arts,
luxuries, and letters,’ when the world was beleaguered against them. Is
it for Vetus, who reprobates the peace of Amiens, _that hollow truce_
(as he justly calls it), that intermission of war but for a moment, to
say of Bonaparte, ‘His application of public industry is only to the
arts of death—all other perishes for want of wholesome nourishment’?
What then becomes of the long-resounded charge against him on his
exclamation ‘for ships, colonies, and commerce’? We suspect, that energy
in war is not an absolute proof of weakness in peace. He lays down,
indeed, a general principle (true enough in itself) that a government,
in its nature and character at variance with the people, must be
comparatively weak and insecure; yet, in applying this maxim, he proves
not that the French people and government are at irreconcileable
variance, but that the one has become entirely subdued and assimilated
to the other. But hear him speak for himself. ‘The causes of the
overthrow of the old government are foreign to our present purpose. The
consequence has been the birth of _this bloody and scorching
despotism_,—this giant, armed from his mother’s womb with sweeping
scimitar and consuming fire. Can such a government be fit for such a
people? Can a tyranny, operating by direct violence and characteristic
of the earliest periods in the most barbarous condition of mankind, have
any quality adapted to the wants or feelings of a nation, grown _old in
arts_, luxuries, and letters? Is it not plain to the least acute
observer, that where the principles of such a government, and such a
stage of society, are so vehemently contrasted, there can be no
immediate alliance; but that an incessant counteraction must ensue—that
the government or the people must change their character before a just
harmony and co-operation can exist between them; _in other words, that
one of them must yield_!’
[Well, this is the very thing which, in the next sentence, he shews has
actually taken place.] ‘And _from whom_ are we to infer this ultimate
submission to its rival? Has the tyrant loosed his chains?—has he
relaxed his hold, or flung aside the whip of scorpions? No! it is
_France herself which has given way_. It is the French nation who
gradually recede from the rest of the civilized world.’ That is, it is
France who, contrary to Vetus’s argument, in receding gradually from the
rest of the civilized world, has been identified with the government,
and become that whip of scorpions in the hands of Bonaparte, which has
been the scourge and dread of all Europe. It is thus that our author
always defeats himself. He is fond of abstruse reasoning and deep
investigation in exact proportion to his incapacity for them—as eunuchs
are amorous through impotence!
But though he fails in his argument, the moral is not less instructive.
He teaches us on what grounds a genuine English patriot goes to war, and
on what terms he will make peace. A patriot of this exclusive stamp, who
is troubled with none of the symptoms of a ‘spurious and mawkish
beneficence,’ threatens France with the restoration of the Bourbons,
only to throw her into the convulsions of anarchy, and withdraws that
kindly interference, only that she may sink into the more fatal lethargy
of despotism. It is the same consistent patriot who kindles the fires of
La Vendée, and whenever it suits his purpose, is no longer borne away by
the ‘torrent of royal, flaming, unreflecting sympathies!’ It is the same
tried friend of his country, who carries on a twenty years’ war for the
preservation of our trade and manufactures, and when they are mentioned
as inducements for peace, disdains ‘all gross, commercial calculations.’
It is the same conscientious politician, who at one time makes war for
the support of social order, and the defence of our holy religion;—who,
at another, hails the disappearance of ‘the last glimmering of education
among a people grown old in arts and letters,’ and who rejoices ‘to see
the Christian religion made studiously contemptible by the poverty and
debasement of its professors!’ It is the same true patriot, the same
Vetus, who ‘beholds with unmingled joy, the growth and accumulation of a
savage despotism, which is to crush and bow down France under our
feet;’—who holds ‘the whip of scorpions over her head;’—who ‘arms a
scorching tyranny with sweeping scimitar and consuming fire’ against
her;—who pushes her headlong down ‘the yawning gulf of irretrievable
destruction;’ it is the same Vetus, who, suddenly recovering all the
severity of justice, and all the tenderness of humanity, makes a piteous
outcry about ‘the dreadful sufferings we have endured,’ in attempting to
heap coals of fire on our adversary, demands the payment of ‘two hundred
millions of debt, in which her government have wantonly involved us,’
complains of our being ‘driven to beggary and want’ in this unnatural
conflict, calls for the release of our countrymen, ‘sent into hopeless
captivity,’ and invokes the murdered names of those children of the
state, who ‘armed to defend a beloved parent, and an injured country!’
Even Vetus shrinks from the enormity of such inconsistencies, and
excuses himself by saying, ‘Do I feel the spontaneous and unprovoked
desire that such a mass of evil should be perpetuated for any portion of
mankind? _God forbid._ But it is, _I conscientiously_ believe, a
question, _which of these countries shall destroy the other_. In that
case, my part is taken—France must be ruined, to save our native country
from being ruined. If this be perpetual war, I cannot help it.
_Perpetual war has little terror, when perpetual bondage threatens us._’
Here then our bane and antidote are both before us: perpetual war or
perpetual bondage;—a pleasant alternative!—but it is an alternative of
Vetus’s making, and we shall not, _if we can help it_, submit to either
of his indispensable conditions. We shall not learn of him, for ‘his
yoke is not easy, nor his burden light.’ If this be our inevitable lot,
‘he cannot help it.’ No; but he can help laying the blame of his own
irritable and mischievous conclusions on Nature and Providence; or at
least we think it our duty to guard ourselves and others against the
fatal delusion.
ILLUSTRATIONS OF VETUS
‘Take him, and cut him out in little stars.’
_Jan. 3, 1814._
We undertook, some time ago, the task of ascertaining the true value of
this writer’s reasoning, by removing the cumbrous load of words which
oppress his understanding, as well as that of his readers; and we find
that ‘our occupation is not yet gone.’ His last letter, indeed,
furnishes us with comparatively slender materials. His style is
considerably abated. With Bottom in the play, he may be said to
‘aggravate his voice so, that he roars you an ’twere any sucking dove.’
His swaggering paradoxes dwindle into unmeaning common-places; his
violent dogmas into tame equivocations. There is scarcely an attempt
made to defend his own extreme opinions, or to repel the charge of gross
and glaring inconsistency which we brought against them. He makes indeed
a faint effort to screen certain general positions from the odium and
contempt they deserve, by explaining them away, and to shift off the
responsibility of others, by directly denying them. Vetus has, in fact,
marched boldly on in a fog of splendid words, till he unexpectedly finds
himself on the edge of a precipice, and he seems willing to retreat from
it as well as his accustomed solemnity, and the incumbrances of his
style will permit. It may, perhaps, be some consolation, if we remind
him that he is not the first enthusiast on record, who mistook a cloud
for a goddess. His present situation is certainly no very pleasant one:
it a good deal resembles that of Parolles, when he undertook the
recovery of his drum.
The most striking part of Vetus’s last letter is his gratuitous _tirade_
against what has been called the modern philosophy, as if this were the
only alternative (whereas it is in truth the antithesis or converse) of
his system of exclusive patriotism. Our contradiction of his first
principle, that the basis of a peace with France is to be one which does
not leave a shadow of regard to her honour, rights, or interest, and
that the terms of peace to which she is in duty bound to accede, must be
such as to imply a _critical advance_ to her destruction—our utter
rejection of this new-fangled theory of negociation he considers as ‘a
sucker from the root of that poisonous vegetable, the doctrine of
universal benevolence,’ and deprecates our reasoning on the subject as
‘a blossom which threatens the desolation of the moral world!’ We really
cannot attribute to our opinions any such power or any such tendency as
the morbid imagination of our political hypochondriac lends to them. The
arguments of Vetus on this question seem a sort of transcript of Dr.
Parr’s Spital Sermon, or of one of Sir James Mackintosh’s lectures at
Lincoln’s Inn; and are very tolerable, dull, common-place declamation—a
little bordering on fustian. But, as is the invariable fate of Vetus’s
arguments, they contain a flat contradiction to the principle he is
aiming to establish. Though the passage has little to do with the
immediate question, we shall give it as a literary curiosity. It is an
instance of one of those lapses of thought, of that epilepsy of the
mind, which we have already pointed out as the distinguishing
characteristic of this author’s understanding. His object is to exclude
all general reasoning, or the seeds of what he absurdly calls
‘theo-philanthropy’ from the feelings of patriotism; and in his
eagerness to do this, he effectually explodes and laughs to scorn all
patriotism, as a branch of the same theo-philanthropy, as impracticable
and romantic folly. His words are these:—
‘One of these patriots enacts the part of a drawling hypocritical
projector, whom no natural affection can move, nor individual happiness
enliven. He is a regular brother of a well known sect, which we of this
generation have had the misfortune to behold in high activity—and which,
having seen, it is but wisdom to remember. The men I speak of were those
who in some degree precipitated the French revolution, and who entirely
perverted its possible uses, the mongrel race of metaphysical
enthusiasts, who undertook to change the objects of human feeling, that
they might disappoint more effectually the ends for which it was
bestowed. Such were the worshippers of the strumpet goddess Reason; a
deity, in herself, and in the prostitute who represented her,
convertible to purposes equally abandoned. The next step, after
acknowledging this divinity, was to make a display of her power. Mankind
were to be _reasoned_ out of _all_ human sensibilities; but the loss was
to be supplied by reasoning them into a new assortment of human
sensibilities, on a larger and nobler scale. Brotherly regard was a puny
sentiment; what was a single brother to him who felt that millions of
freemen were his brothers! Marriage, too, that holy and heavenly[10] and
heart-sustaining institution, what with its graceful and beautiful
assemblage of bland obligations and virtuous sympathies—how stood the
fixed relation of husband and wife? Why, treason to natural
liberty!—“exclusive tenderness”—a bar to the performance of those
unconfined embraces, which spoke the reign of universal love. Parental
affection, and filial piety, also, were still less worthy to escape the
blight of this ruthless philosophical reform. How narrow was the
father’s mansion! How diminutive the mind that could look with reverence
to the beings that gave it birth, when the republic, sole heiress of
philanthropy and freedom—the great republic, offered herself as the fond
and universal parent. Nor could the sire, who argued logically, bewail
the sacrifice of his devoted offspring. His children—not his, but their
country’s children—were to be educated by and for that country. His
paternal feelings were not to be extinguished—no, nothing more than
transferred to the state, and ennobled by the magnitude of the object.
This same republic was a perfect “Scrub.” She was to play the sister,
husband, wife, son, and mother—confiscating and appropriating the
individual duties, rights, and charities of mankind—ransacking the
deepest recesses of the heart, and seizing as prizes to her sovereign
will the royalties and wrecks of human nature.
‘_But the phrenzy did not terminate here._ It was not enough that all
the relations of life should merge in that of citizen: even “exclusive
patriotism” was a vulgar thought. In the paroxysms of disorder, it was
sometimes proposed, that the citizen himself should evaporate into a
citizen of the world. The universal republic—the vast family of
mankind—the deputations from the human race—became instruments with the
knaves who led, and visions for the dupes who admired. There can really
be no objection to this superfine theory, but that it is inconsistent
with the order of Providence, and destructive of the nature of man—that
it unfixes our moral land-marks—melts into air every practical virtue
and definite duty—substitutes words for salutary deeds—and by directing
our most natural and useful passions to objects indistinct or
unattainable, leaves these powerful agents afloat, and ends by abusing
them to the production of crime and misery. Such were the results of
that system of speculation, which assumed for its basis the existence of
a species of beings far above the pitch of humanity, and which, in its
application to human affairs, reduces them to the level of brutes.
‘A sucker from the root of this poisonous vegetable is again in blossom,
and threatens the desolation of the moral world. We are called upon to
abdicate the right and obligation of preferring and protecting our
native country, that is, of enjoying our proper advantages, and of
discharging our specific trusts—and for what? Why, that we may undertake
the preposterous office, and execute the factitious duty of handing over
to a mortal enemy the greatness to which we have waded through blood and
fire, and raising his empire on the ruins of our own. Beware, we are
warned, of neglecting the rights of the adversary. It is our peculiar
business to guard the rights of France.’[11]
The whole of this pompous episode is a mere diversion to the question.
Vetus, some time ago, asked, in a tone which could not be mistaken, ‘Who
are the French nation? A rank non-entity. Who are to be the sole judges
of the rights and pretensions of what once was France? We, and our
allies!’—and when we protest against this unheard-of basis of a
negociation between rival states, he answers with a tedious
prize-dissertation on the doctrine of universal benevolence, and the
perfectibility of man. Vetus insists on a peace (the only peace fit for
a wise nation) that shall remain a proud monument of its own
superiority,—that is, a peace which can never be made between any two
states, a peace that does not admit of the shadow of regard to the
rights, interests, or honour of the enemy, a peace that implies a
critical advance to the destruction of France. But it seems, that all
this proud display of pedantic phraseology, by which he attempted to
‘confound the ignorant, and amaze indeed the very faculties of eyes and
ears,’ now means nothing more than that we are to guard and protect our
native country, and not surrender our own rights to the enemy. There
needed no oracle to tell us that. But Vetus, having set out on the
forlorn hope of political paradox, is himself ashamed to turn back to a
trite truism, and contends that there is no safety for this country but
in the destruction of the enemy, and no patriotism which is not
inconsistent with the rights, liberties, and even existence of other
countries. We deny it. We say there is a patriotism consistent with the
claims of reason, justice, and humanity; and another _exclusive_ of
them. The latter is Vetus’s patriotism; the former is ours. This we have
stated before. We do not wonder that Vetus has not answered it; for it
does not admit of an answer.
It seems, however, that the view we have taken (in common with all
civilized nations) of this subject, is ‘a sucker from the poisonous root
of universal benevolence’; and Vetus’s prejudices, coupling with that
_strumpet_ Reason, beget in his mind a sort of ‘mongrel metaphysical
enthusiasm,’ in which he sees visions, and has revelations of the
general nature of man. He tells us, we are regular adepts in that school
which, under the direction of the goddess, or the strumpet, Reason, (for
with him they are both the same) trampled on all human sensibilities,
and the charities of private life, to offer them up as a sacrifice to
that _monstrous fiction_, their country, and then to that _more
monstrous fiction_, their kind. This is the most curious defence of
patriotism we ever met with, and a striking instance of the pains which
this laborious reasoner takes to confute himself. Our country, according
to this patriotic writer, is ‘a perfect Scrub,’ a kind of Sin and Death
business, a contradiction, and a dire chimera, ‘confiscating and
appropriating the individual duties, rights, and charities of
mankind—ransacking the deepest recesses of the heart, and seizing as
prizes to her sovereign will the royalties and wrecks of human nature.’
It is ‘a superfine theory, inconsistent with the order of Providence,
and destructive of the nature of man, and which, by pretending to raise
us far above the pitch of humanity, degrades us below the level of
brutes.’ But then ‘there is a phrenzy still greater’ than this, which is
the love of mankind. This is the consummation of enormity, and the
triumph of the strumpet-goddess. Vetus has here fallen into a more
desperate dilemma than any he has yet encountered in his perilous way.
We present him with the choice of a pair of alternatives: either he must
mean that the love of the republic, or our country, which he treats with
such profound contempt and abhorrence, is only bad when it destroys the
private and natural affections, or he must exclude at once every shadow
of regard to the rights, liberties, and happiness of mankind, and then
the same thing will follow of patriotism itself, which, as he says
truly, is an emanation from the same impure source, human reason, and so
to establish his favourite principle of _exclusive_ patriotism, he gets
rid of it altogether. ‘The latter end of this writer’s reasoning always
forgets the beginning.’ We will tell Vetus the hinge on which this whole
controversy turns, and what is the radical error of the system of
general philanthropy, which he has attempted to expose. It is, that it
is an _exclusive_ system, and is therefore unfitted for the nature of
man, who is a mixed being, made up of various principles, faculties, and
feelings. All these are good in their place and degree, as well as the
affections that spring from them—natural affection, patriotism,
benevolence: it is only _exclusive_ selfishness, _exclusive_ patriotism,
_exclusive_ philanthropy, that are inconsistent with the order of
Providence, and destructive of the nature of man: Vetus in avoiding one
extreme has fallen into another, for the extremes not only ‘of faction’
but of folly meet; though we should be loth to compare the splendid
dreams of the philosophical enthusiast, who wished to raise man above
the pitch of his common nature, to the groveling, sordid, shuffling
paradoxes of Vetus, who would degrade him below the level of the brutes,
and whose maxims are as repugnant to common sense, and the practical
rules of life, as they are devoid of every thing elegant in imagination,
or consistent in reasoning.
ILLUSTRATIONS OF VETUS
(CONCLUDED)
‘What do you read, my lord?—Words, words, words.
What is the matter?——_Nothing_.’
_Jan. 5, 1814._
We gave in our last article Vetus’s quaint denunciation of the
principles of patriotism and philanthropy. It appears by this, that the
same ‘jargon of metaphysics,’ and the same vapid rhetoric may be
employed against both these sacred and inviolable feelings, by any one
who is weak and vain enough to suppose that language was given us, not
to communicate truth to others, but to impose falsehood on ourselves.
Does Vetus mean to assert, that his _topics_ are fatal to all
patriotism, as well as all philanthropy? Or (which is the alternative)
that they are fatal to neither, properly understood,—that there is a
true and a false patriotism, a true and a false philanthropy? What will
‘the acknowledged saviours of Europe, the magnanimous defenders of the
commonwealth of nations, the liberators of Spain, the recreators of
Portugal, the regenerators of Germany,’ say to Vetus’s exclusive
patriotism? Or, we would ask, whether the abuse of reason, of which he
complains in certain moderns, is a sufficient cause that we should
explode it altogether? In the dialect of Don Quixote’s books of
chivalry, must ‘the unreasonableness of their reason so unreason our
reason,’ that we are to reject the faculty, both root and branch? Shall
we impiously renounce the goddess, because she has been personated by a
strumpet? Reason is the queen of the moral world, the soul of the
universe, the lamp of human life, the pillar of society, the foundation
of law, the beacon of nations, the golden chain, let down from heaven,
which links all animated and all intelligent natures in one common
system—and in the vain strife between fanatic innovation, and fanatic
prejudice we are exhorted to dethrone this queen of the world, to blot
out this light of the mind, to deface this fair column, to break in
pieces this golden chain! We are to discard and throw from us, with loud
taunts and bitter imprecations, that reason, which has been the lofty
theme of the philosopher, the poet, the moralist, and the divine, whose
name was not first named to be abused by the enthusiasts of the French
revolution, or to be blasphemed by the madder enthusiasts, their
opponents, but is coeval with, and inseparable from the nature and
faculties of man,—is the image of his Maker stamped upon him at his
birth, the understanding breathed into him with the breath of life, and
in the participation of which alone he is raised above the brute
creation, and his own physical nature!—Vetus labours hard to persuade
us, that the goddess and the strumpet are really one person, equally
‘convertible to the same abandoned purposes;’ that reason and sophistry
are the same thing. He may find his account in endeavouring to confound
them; but his indifference betrays the hollowness of his claims to true
reason, as the false mother was detected by her willingness to
compromise her own pretensions, only to be revenged on her rival.
Vetus has, however, without knowing it, stumbled on an important truth,
which is, that patriotism, in modern times, and in great states, is and
must be the creature of reason and reflection, rather than the offspring
of physical or local attachment. Our country is a complex abstract
existence, known only to the understanding. It is an immense riddle,
containing numberless modifications of reason and prejudice, of thought
and passion. Patriotism is not, in a strict or exclusive sense, a
natural or personal affection, but a law of our rational and moral
nature, strengthened and determined by particular circumstances and
associations, but not born of them, nor wholly nourished by them. It is
not possible that we should have an individual attachment to sixteen
millions of men, any more than to sixty millions. We cannot be attached,
except rationally and ‘logically,’ to places we never saw, and people we
never heard of. Is not the name of Englishman a general term, as well as
that of man? How many varieties does it not combine within it? Are the
opposite extremities of the globe our native place, because they are a
part of that geographical and political denomination, our country? Does
natural affection expand in circles of latitude and longitude? What
personal or instinctive sympathy has the English peasant with the
African slave-driver, or East India nabob? None but the most ‘drawling
hypocritical’ sophist will say that there is any. These wretched
bunglers in metaphysics would fain persuade us to discard all public
principle, and all sense of abstract justice, as a violation of natural
affection, and yet do not see that the love of our country is itself in
the order of our general affections, except, indeed, that exclusive sort
which consists in a mere negation of humanity and justice. The common
notions of patriotism are, in fact, transmitted to us from the savage
tribes, or from the states of Greece and Rome, where the fate and
condition of all was the same, or where the country of the citizen was
the town in which he was born. Where this is no longer the case, where
our country is no longer contained within the narrow circle of the same
walls, where we can no longer behold its glimmering horizon from the top
of our native mountains—beyond these limits it is not a natural but an
artificial idea, and our love of it either an habitual dictate of
reason, or a cant term. It was said by an acute observer, and eloquent
writer, that the love of mankind was nothing but the love of justice:
the same might be said, with considerable truth, of the love of our
country. It is little more than another name for the love of liberty, of
independence, of peace and social happiness. We do not say, that other
indirect and collateral circumstances do not go to the superstructure of
this sentiment, (as language,[12] literature, manners, national
customs,) but this is the broad and firm basis. All other patriotism,
not founded on, or not consistent with truth, justice, and humanity, is
a painted sepulchre, fair without, but full of ravening and all
uncleanness within. ‘It leaves our passions afloat, and ends with
abusing them to crime and misery.’ It is the watchword of faction, the
base pander of avarice and pride, the ready tool in the hands of those
who, having no sense of public duty, and disclaiming all pretensions to
common humanity, sacrifice the lives of millions to the madness of one,
and are eager to offer up their country a devoted victim at the shrine
of power, as the miserable slave is yoked to the foul Eastern idol,[13]
and crushed beneath its chariot wheels! Thus the hired scribbler of a
profligate newspaper sits secure and self-satisfied at his desk—with a
venomed word, or a lie that looks like truth, sends thousands of his
countrymen to death,—receives his pay, and scribbles on, regardless of
the dying and the dead!—And this is patriotism.
The _tempora mollia fandi_ do not belong to Vetus any more than to
ourselves. He is, like us, but an uncouth courtier, a rough, sturdy,
independent politician, who thinks and speaks for himself. He complains
of ‘the soft nonsense whispered in the higher circles,’ and gossipped in
_The Morning Post_, in favour of peace. Be it so, for once, that these
soft whispers are fraught with ruin, dishonour, and slavery to this
country. Yet, if the effeminate and dastard sound once floats through
the air, borne on the downy wing of fashion—if it is whispered from the
prince to the peer, and from lords to ladies, from ministers to their
clerks, from their clerks to the treasury-prints, and from the knaves
who write to the dupes who read—even the warning voice of Vetus will not
be able to prevent the Syren sound from spreading in gentle murmurs, and
‘smoothing the raven down of discord, till it smiles.’ And will Vetus
pretend such ignorance both of the court and of the country, as not to
know, that whether the word is war or peace, the same effect will
follow—that whether the breath of kings breathe ‘airs from heaven or
blasts from hell,’ the same well-attuned system of undulating sounds
will disperse them wide in eddying circles, and the same round of smiles
and whispers and significant shrugs will be repeated, whether the
country bleeds or starves, is enslaved within, or conquered without? All
those who do not catch the soft whisper, and mimic the gracious smile,
and join the magic circle, are no better than hypocrites, madmen, and
traitors to _their country_! We know it well.
Vetus in vain attempts to repel the charge which we brought against _The
Times_, whose profession of eternal war with Bonaparte we said was
incompatible with the possibility of his making peace with us, by
asserting that this doctrine is ‘an audacious plagiarism, from the
portfolio of the French Minister.’ We have not such near access to the
portfolio of the French Government as this writer; but we have access to
_The Times_, and there we find this audacious plagiarism written in
large letters in almost every page. We say that wherever the doctrine is
found (whoever invented or whoever adopted it), there is an insuperable
bar to peace. If it is found on one side, that is the responsible side;
if it is found on both, neither can reproach the other with the
continuance of hostilities. This statement is plain and unanswerable.
Does Vetus think to ‘thrust us from a level consideration by a confident
brow, and the throng of words which come with such affected gravity from
him’? He disclaims the doctrine for himself. Why then is he so eager to
justify it in _The Times_? They are caught in the fact; they are taken
with the _manner_; and Vetus would divert us from executing summary
justice on them, by offering himself as security that they are only the
receivers of the stolen goods; ‘the audacious plagiarists,’ instead of
the atrocious inventors of this mischievous doctrine. Besides, the
answer is a wretched evasion, and makes the assertion itself senseless
and nugatory. The principle of _The Times_ was and is (if they have not
retracted it) that we are never to make peace with Bonaparte at all,
that is, though he would make peace with us, (otherwise the words have
no meaning) and then comes the gloss of Vetus, which is, that we will
not make peace with him, only because he will not make peace with us.
Ridiculous!—Vetus asks, ‘Who has been the founder of this shocking
creed—who the aggressor—who the unrelenting enemies of peace?’ May we
not answer—‘The incessant war-faction of England’? Why would Vetus strip
‘these acknowledged saviours of Europe’ of the praise which is so justly
due to them, or degrade them from that proud eminence which they have
maintained with so much persevering fortitude? We cannot withhold from
these persons our sincere conscientious thanks for all the benefits
which this war has conferred on our country, on Europe, and the world.
While France strove insidiously to ruin us by peace, these firm patriots
have always been determined to save us by war—from ‘England’s greatest
and most magnanimous politician,’ down to the last desperate incendiary
of _The Times_, who is only willing to conclude ‘a Regicide Peace’ by
celebrating ‘the condign and solemn punishment of Bonaparte!’[14]
Vetus says, that ‘eternal war is no expression of his, and that it is a
deliberate falsehood in us who assert that he has used it, or that this
country has no alternative between eternal war and eternal bondage.’ ‘It
is not England,’ he says, ‘but France—not Vetus, but the French
government—who has broached the creed, and one of the two countries must
in the end destroy the other.’
If it is a falsehood, it is a deliberate one, for we do deliberately
assert that he uses these words, and inculcates this doctrine
incessantly. But instead of contradicting Vetus, it is better to let him
contradict himself; no one else can do it so effectually. In his last
letter but one he has these words:—‘It is, I conscientiously believe, a
question, _which of these two countries shall destroy the other_. In
that case my part is taken.—France must be ruined to save our native
country from being ruined.—If this be perpetual war, I cannot help
it.—Perpetual war has little terror, when perpetual bondage threatens
us.’ Either the interpretation of this passage is that which we have
given to it, or, as Vetus says, ‘the English language must be
constructed anew.’
He now, indeed, mitigates the dread sentence he had passed upon us, by
saying, not that we have no alternative but either war, or slavery, or
_peace_. We are glad that Vetus has introduced this new clause in our
favour into the codicil; it was not in the original will, or expressed
in such faint characters, that we, with the rest of the public, missed
the intended benefaction. Just in the same manner, that profound
politician and humane writer, the author of the Essay on Population,
found out that the only possible checks to excessive population, were
vice and misery, which were, therefore, to be considered as the greatest
blessings of mankind, and having gained a vast reputation by this
singular discovery, he then recollected what every one knew before, that
there was another check to this principle, viz. _moral restraint_, and
that consequently vice and misery were not the greatest blessings of
society.
We did not state it as an inconsistency in Vetus, that he held out
_France_ as an object of terror, and yet recommended a negociation with
Bonaparte, because his government tended to weaken France, but we did
state it as a rank inconsistency in Vetus to hold up _Bonaparte_ as an
object of peculiar terror to this country, and yet to represent his
government as tottering on the brink of deplorable weakness and
unavoidable ruin. Vetus could not meet the objection, and he has altered
the terms.
Vetus concludes his letter with the following note:—
‘_The stupid impertinence_’ (charged on the attacks made upon him) ‘has
no relation to _The Morning Chronicle_, with which I am disposed to part
in peace. One feels a tolerance towards that paper, for the talents
which once adorned it; and of the continuance of which I should rejoice
to see more proof in its late attacks on Vetus. We have little common
faith in politics, but we have, I trust, a common stake in the spirit
and dignity of the press.’
We are obliged to Vetus for this amicable offer, of the sincerity of
which we entertain no doubt. As to the talent shown in our attacks on
him, we are ready to admit that it is little enough; but we at the same
time think that if it had been greater, it would have been more than the
occasion required. We have no enmity to Vetus, but to his extravagance,
and if he will correct that, he will save us the trouble of correcting
it for him. We are ready to believe that this writer has talents and
acquirements which might be made useful to the public, if he would
forego his mistaken pretensions to extraordinary wisdom and eloquence.
The qualities of profound thought and splendid imagery are seldom found
singly in the same person, and the union of both together is an
undertaking much beyond the capacity of Vetus. And now we leave him to
return to his indigestions with ‘what appetite he may.’[15]
ON THE LATE WAR
_April 3, 1814._
The systematic patrons of eternal war are always returning, when they
dare, to the point from which they set out twenty years ago; the war
with them has not yet lost its original character: they have long
memories: they never lose sight of their objects and principles. We
cannot but admire their candour as well as their consistency, and would
wish to imitate it. It is deemed necessary by the everlasting
war-faction to prove in their own justification, ‘that the march to
Paris was not chimerical in 1793,’ by carrying it into effect now, and
to blot France out of the map of Europe, three-and-twenty years after
the event had been announced by that great prophet and politician, Mr.
Burke. This splendid reverie is not yet accomplished. The triumph of the
Pitt-school over the peace-faction is not yet complete; but we are put
in complete possession of what is required to make it so. As the war
with them was a war of extermination, so the peace, not to fix a lasting
stigma on their school and principles, must be a peace of extermination.
This is what we always said and thought of those principles and that
school. This is their triumph, their _only_ triumph—the true crown of
their hopes, the consummation of their utmost wishes, nothing short of
which can satisfy their proud pretensions, or finish this just and
necessary war, as it was begun. Otherwise, no peace for them; otherwise,
they will have failed in both branches of that happy dilemma, hit upon
by the beneficent genius of ‘the great statesman, now no more,’ the
necessity of destroying France, or being ourselves destroyed in the
attempt. If they succeed in neither experiment, all that they have done
is surely lost labour. They have then a right to their revenge, ‘their
pound of carrion-flesh’—‘’tis theirs, ’tis dearly bought, and they will
have it.’ Be it so. But we shall let them feast alone: we are not
_man-eaters_. We shall not join the barbarous yell of this worse than
Thracian rout, nor figure in at the close of their dance of death, nor
applaud the catastrophe of their twenty years’ tragedy. We did not
approve it in its commencement or progress; nor will we hail its
threatened conclusion. We have had, and we will have, no hand in the
plot, the execution, the scene-shifting, or the decoration. We leave the
full credit of it to the original authors; and, in spite of all the
puffing of the Bayes’s of the Pitt-school, the only answer they will get
from us is, ‘’Tis an indifferent piece of work: would ’twere done!’
Though the torch of _The Times_ blazes over Paris, ‘fierce as a comet’;
though _The Sun_ sees the lilied banner of the Bourbons floating before
Lord Wellington in the plains of Normandy; though _The Courier_ is
setting out post-haste to break up the negociations at Chatillon; and
_The Morning Herald_ sheds tears of joy over the fashionable virtues of
the rising generation, and finds that we shall make better
man-milliners, better lacqueys, and better courtiers than ever—we remain
sceptical as to the success, and more than sceptical as to the necessity
of this last cast of our political dicers, and desperate venture of our
licenced dealers and chapmen in morality and massacre. In our opinion,
lives enough have been thrown away to prove, that the survivors are only
born to _bear fardels_. This is the moral of the piece, if it succeeds
on the principles of the Pitt-school, and all short of that is mere
gratuitous mischief. The war, conducted on those principles and for
those purposes, ‘was not, and it cannot come to good.’ Its failure, or
its success, must be fatal.
The war, as it was carried on from the first by the Pitt-school, and as
they would now revive it, was not a national quarrel, but a question
about a political principle. It had no more to do with France or England
as geographical denominations, than the wars between the Guelphs and
Gibelines. It was not a war of mercantile advantage, or a trial of
strength between two countries, which must be decided by the turn of
events, by the probable calculation of loss and profit, but a war
against an opinion, which could, therefore, never cease, but with the
extirpation of that opinion. Hence there could be neither safety, nor
honour, nor justice, in any terms of peace with the French government,
because, by the supposition, it was not with its power or its conduct,
but with its existence, that we were at war. Hence the impossibility of
maintaining the relations of peace and amity with France. Hence Mr.
Burke’s regicide war. Hence the ridiculousness asserted by _The
Courier_, of even attempting negociation with this hated power. Hence
the various and contradictory aspects which the war assumed after its
first outset, and all of which answered the purpose equally well,
because there was another pivot on which the whole turned, the
sheet-anchor which never loosed its hold, and which enabled ‘the pilot
to weather the storm.’ It was not a temporary or local question of the
boundaries, the possessions, or particular rights of rival states, but a
question, in which all states are at all times equally interested, of
the internal right of any people to choose its own form of government.
Whether this was a just ground of war or not, is another question; but
it was the true one—that which gave its character to the war, and
accounts for all its consequences. It was a war of proscription against
a great and powerful state, for having set the example of a people
ridding itself of an odious and despicable tyranny. It was the question
of the balance of power between kings and people; a question, compared
with which the balance of power in Europe is petty and insignificant.
That what we have here stated, are the real and paramount grounds of
this bloody and inveterate contest in the minds of the war-faction is,
what we apprehend they will not, in their present state of frenzy, deny.
They are the only ones that always survive the shock of accident and the
fluctuation of circumstances, and which are always recurred to when all
others fail, and are constantly avowed in the face of day, whenever the
least probability of success attends them. It has been declared again
and again, month after month, and year after year, that no peace should
be made with France till the last remaining effort had been tried to
attain this object. We were to bury ourselves with our great
war-minister, under the ruins of the civilized world, sooner than relax
in our exertions, or recede from our object. No sacrifices were to be
held too dear—no sufferings too great in the prosecution of this sacred
cause. No other than the last extremity was to force peace from us.
Nothing short of the complete subjugation of France was to satisfy
us—nothing short of our own ruin was to drive us to despair. We were
like wrestlers, struggling on the edge of a precipice, one (or both) of
whom must be certain of destruction. Such were the mad, mischievous, and
unprincipled terms, on which a pampered crew of sycophants have played
away the welfare, the repose, the liberties, and happiness of mankind,
and on which they would now urge us to stake our all again, to realize
their favourite scheme of the march to Paris, and the annihilation of
the French people.
The consequences of the Pitt project were inevitable. From the moment
that the existence of France as a nation was declared to be incompatible
with that of the surrounding states—that she was denounced as a nuisance
which must be abated, and set up as a mark for the vengeance of the rest
of the world, the struggle necessarily became convulsive, and the
re-action terrible. Is it then a matter of wonder, that in this
unnatural strife, France, proscribed, hunted down, put out of the pale
of nations, endeavoured rather to reduce others to the last extremity
than to be reduced to it herself? Or are we entitled to wreak that
vengeance upon her which we could not at first execute, because the
engine which we had prepared to crush her has recoiled with the greatest
violence upon ourselves? It has been said that we less easily forgive
the injuries we do or meditate against others, than those we receive
from them. There are, we know, persons to whom the celebrated line of
the historian is, at all times, applicable: _Odia in longum jaciens, quæ
conderet, auctaque promeret_. We are not surprised to find that the good
intentions of these persons towards France, though she did not submit to
the original tender made to her of their kind interference and paternal
care, have not spoiled by keeping. If Titus complained with so much
bitterness, that he had lost a day to virtue, what must not some modern
friends to mankind feel, when they reflect that they have lost so many
years in the execution of their just and beneficent plans!—In spite of
Mr. Southey’s reasoning in his _Carmen Triumphale_, about joining ‘the
avengers of mankind,’ we conceive that the wheel has gone once round
already, ‘full circle home,’ and that now it had better stand still.
But it may be said, do we mean to apply these remarks to Bonaparte? As
far as relates to any merits of the war-faction. It was they who
implicated him with the cause of the French people, as ‘the child and
champion of Jacobinism.’ We cannot express our opinion better than in
the words of Mr. Whitebread, ‘that England had made Bonaparte, and he
had undone himself.’ He was the creature of the Pitt-school. Was the
iron scourge which he has held over Europe put into his hands by the
peace-party? Were the battles of Austerlitz and Jena—were the march to
Vienna, the possession of Berlin, the invasion of Spain, the expedition
to Russia, and the burning of Moscow, the consequences of the signing or
of the breaking of the treaty of Amiens?
The author of the letters of Vetus, (who we suppose is silenced by _The
Times_, for asserting that the Bourbons have no more a lawful right to
the throne of France, at this moment, than the Stuarts had to the throne
of England twenty years after the Revolution of 1688,) is of opinion,
that this war is merely national, merely the old grudge between the two
countries; and that the Bourbons, the Republic, and Bonaparte, are
equally hostile to England, and we to them. In this, as in most things
else, our opinion is the opposite of his. There is only one period of
the history of the two countries, which, reversed, furnishes an exact
counterpart to the present contest, both in its avowed principles and
secret motives—we mean the war waged by Louis XIV. against this country
and its allies, for nearly as long a period after the English
Revolution. The difference in the results of these two revolutions has
been this: that from the insular situation of this country, which
enables us to do either right or wrong, nearly with impunity, and which
makes our means of defence greater, and our means of offence
proportionably less—that from this collateral cause, the internal
struggle, in proportion to the danger, was less bloody in our own case,
and the re-action of our efforts to defend ourselves from the imposition
of a foreign yoke and of hereditary slavery, less violent and fatal to
other states. All the differences have arisen from the character of the
two nations, and from local and accidental circumstances: there was none
in the abstract political principle. We gave them the example of their
Revolution; we also gave them an example of ‘national fortitude’ in
maintaining it. We—the people of England, (not an upstart jacobite
faction in the Hanoverian line,) are proud of having imitators; and we
think it not unlikely that the French, if forced upon it, may behave on
this occasion as the English behaved, when an hereditary pretender came
over to us, backed by the aid of foreign arms, to assert his lawful
claim to the throne—that is, in other words, to be the natural
proprietor of a whole people. We twice sent him back again with all his
myrmidons; we would not be made a property of. We felt that in not doing
so we should be traitors, not only to our country, but to our kind—the
worst species of treason to our country. It is curious that the ‘deepest
enmity which the French people have drawn down upon them by their early
struggles in the same cause, should be shewn by that government who had
long insulted the slavery of Europe by the loudness of its boasts of
freedom.’ We do not know how it is, but so it has happened, that in the
thirty years of war which have graced the annals of the present reign,
there has been a considerable want of sympathy between the crown and the
people, as if the quarrel were merely the cause of kings, in which the
people had no concern. Has this circumstance arisen from any unpleasant
sense of obligation, or consciousness of a little irregularity and
deviation from the right line in the descent of the crown, no more
accounted for in Mr. Burke’s Reflections, than the declination of atoms
in Epicurus’s philosophy? The restoration of the Bourbons in France will
be the re-establishment of the principles of the Stuarts in this
country.[16]
PRINCE MAURICE’S PARROT
OR, FRENCH INSTRUCTIONS TO A BRITISH PLENIPOTENTIARY
_Sept. 18, 1814._
1. That the French people were so deeply implicated in the Slave trade,
as not even to know that it had been abolished by this country.
2. That the French press had been so long under the complete despotic
control of Bonaparte, that the present government must despair of making
any immediate impression on the independence of the political opinions,
or the energetic firmness of the individual feelings of the people,
lately consigned to their protection.
3. That such were their blind and rooted prejudices against the English,
that we could only hope to convince them of our entire sincerity and
disinterestedness in abolishing the Slave Trade ourselves, by lending a
helping hand to its revival by others.
4. That if we consented to give up our colonial conquests to the French,
on conditions dictated only by the general principles of humanity, this
would be a proof that we intended to keep them in our hands from the
most base and mercenary motives.
5. That the French government simply wished to begin the Slave Trade
again as the easiest way of leaving it off, that so they might combine
the experiment of its gradual restoration with that of its gradual
abolition, and, by giving the people an interest in it, more effectually
wean their affections from it.
6. That it is highly honourable in us to have proposed, and in the
French to have agreed to, the abolition of the Slave Trade, at the end
of five years, though it would have been insulting in us to have
proposed, and degrading in them to have submitted to, any stipulation on
the subject.
7. That to rob and murder on the coast of Africa is among the internal
rights of legislation and domestic privileges of every European and
Christian state.
8. That we are not to teach the French people religion and morality at
the point of the sword, though this is what we have been professing to
teach them for the last two and twenty years.
9. That his most Christian Majesty Louis XVIII. is so fully impressed
with the humane and benevolent sentiments of Great Britain and the
allies in favour of the abolition of the Slave Trade, that he was ready
to have plunged all Europe into a war for its continuance.
10. That we could not possibly make the abolition, (though the French
government would certainly have made the revival) of the Slave Trade a
_sine qua non_ in the treaty of peace, and that they would otherwise
have gone to war to recover by force of arms what they can only owe to
the credulity or complaisance of our negociators.
Lastly. That by consenting to the re-establishment of the Slave Trade in
France, we were most effectually preparing the way for its abolition all
over the world.
‘With so little a web as this will I ensnare so great a fly as
_Cassio_!’—Such were the formidable barriers, the intricate lines of
circumvallation, drawn by the French round the abolition of the Slave
Trade, as strong as those which they threw up to defend their capital:
yet we think, that after our political missionary had overleaped the
one, he might have broken through the other. Where there is a will,
there is a way. But there are some minds to which every flimsy pretext
presents an insurmountable obstacle, where only the interests of justice
and humanity are at stake. These persons are always impotent to
save—powerful only to oppress and to betray. Their torpid faculties and
amiable apathy are never roused but by the calculations of
self-interest, or the thirst of revenge. The glossy sleekness of the
panther’s skin does not blunt the sharpness of his fangs, and his
fawning eye dooms his victim while it glitters. But to come to Lord
Castlereagh. In the present instance, he appears to have been cajoled
into acquiescence from his well-known indifference to the object. His
speech contained nothing but a story of a cock and a bull, told by M.
Talleyrand with great grace and gravity, assented to by his Lordship
with equal affability and address, and repeated to the House of Commons
with hesitating volubility and plausible negligence of manner. It is
well to sacrifice to the graces; but it is too much to have sacrificed a
whole continent to the graces of M. Talleyrand’s person, or the purity
of his French accent. We can imagine how the scene took place. This
question of Africa, being considered as an idle question, in which
neither courts nor ministers were concerned, would be naturally left as
a sort of _carte-blanche_ for all the flourishes of national
_politesse_, as a kind of _no man’s ground_ for a trial of diplomatic
skill and complaisance. So Lord Castlereagh, drawing on his gloves,
hemmed once or twice, while the French minister carelessly took snuff:
he then introduced the question with a smile, which was answered by a
more gracious smile from M. Talleyrand: his Lordship then bowed, as if
to bespeak attention; but the Prince of Benevento bowing still lower,
prevented what he had to say; and the cries of Africa were lost amidst
the nods and smile and shrugs of these demi-puppets. The Ex-bishop of
Autun may in future hope to find a successful representative in the
English Ambassador from Paris; for the noble secretary _mistified_ the
house, as he had himself been _mistified_ by his highness of
Benevento.—Count Fathom, after his defeat by the French abbé, practised
in this his adopted country with great applause! We may take this
opportunity of remarking, that we do not think his Lordship at all
improved during his stay in France. He performs the arc of his
oscillation from the treasury bench to the table, and from the table
back again, in a second less time than he used to do. He commits dulness
with greater vivacity, and flounders more briskly in an argument. He has
enhanced the loose dangling slip-shod manner which so well accords with
his person and understanding, into something positive and dogmatical;
and is even grown tenacious of the immaculateness of his maiden treaty,
which he will not have so much as suspected: In this alteration of tone
we think him wrong. We have always looked upon Lord Castlereagh as an
excellent taffeta lining to a court dress; but he should leave the
buckram of office to his friend the secretary of the Admiralty.
WHETHER THE FRIENDS OF FREEDOM CAN ENTERTAIN ANY SANGUINE HOPES OF THE
FAVOURABLE RESULTS OF THE ENSUING CONGRESS?
_Oct. 23, 1814._
An excellent article appeared in the EXAMINER of last week, giving a
general outline of the views and principles which ought to actuate the
allied powers at the approaching Congress, and of the leading
arrangements with respect to the different subjects to be brought under
consideration, which ought to follow from those principles. Cordially as
we agree with this respectable writer in the several points which he has
stated, we are, we confess, far from feeling any strong assurances that
even any one of these points will be amicably adjusted. They are briefly
these:—1. That Poland should be restored to her independence. 2. That
the other powers of Europe should no longer co-operate with Sweden in
the subjugation of Norway. 3. That the Slave Trade should be immediately
and generally abolished. 4. That Saxony should not share a fate similar
to that of Poland. 5. That Austria should relinquish her views of unjust
aggrandisement in Italy. 6. and last, That some concessions should
probably be made by England as to her exclusive claims to maritime
supremacy, as far as those claims are found to be rather galling to the
feelings of other nations, than essential to her own security. All of
the objects here recommended are, we should imagine, every way
practicable as well as desirable, if there were any thing like a hearty
good-will to avail themselves of the present favourable situation of the
world in those who have the power to decide its fate. Armed with
sovereign authority, seconded by public opinion, with every obstacle
removed from their dread of the overwhelming power of France, they have
all the means at their disposal to rear a splendid, lofty, and lasting
monument to justice, liberty, and humanity. Are the views then of the
allied sovereigns solely directed to these objects? That is the simple
question; and we are afraid it would be great presumption to answer it
in the affirmative. It would be supposing that the late events have
purified the hearts of princes and nations; that they have been taught
wisdom by experience, and the love of justice from the sense of injury;
that mutual confidence and good-will have succeeded to narrow prejudices
and rankling jealousy; that the race of ambitious and unprincipled
monarchs, of crafty politicians, and self-interested speculators is at
an end; that the destructive rivalry between states has given way to
liberal and enlightened views of general safety and advantage; and that
the powers of Europe will in future unite with the same zeal and
magnanimity for the common good, as when they were bound in a common
cause against the common enemy. All this appears to us quite as Utopian
as any other scheme which supposes that the human mind can change. Happy
should we be, if instead of those magnificent and beneficial projects in
which some persons seem still to indulge their imaginations as the
results of this meeting, the whole should not turn out to be no better
than a compromise of petty interests, of shallow policy, and flagrant
injustice.
We forbore for a long time from saying any thing on this ungrateful
subject: but our forbearance has not hitherto, at least, been rewarded.
We shall therefore speak out plainly on the subject; as we should be
sorry to be thought accomplices in a delusion, which can only end in
disappointment. The professions of justice, moderation, and the love of
liberty, made by the powers of Europe at the end of the last, and at the
beginning of the present year, were certainly admirable: they were
called for at the time, and were possibly sincere. But we are all of us
apt to forego those good resolutions which are extorted from us by
circumstances rather than from reason or habit, and to recant ‘vows made
in pain as violent and void.’ Without meaning any indirect allusion to
the person into whose mouth these words are put, we believe this, that
princes are princes, and that men are men; and that to expect any great
sacrifices of interest or passion from either in consequence of certain
well-timed and well-sounding professions, drawn from them by necessity,
when that necessity no longer exists, is to belie all our experience of
human nature. We remember what modern courts and ministers were before
the dreaded power of Bonaparte arose; and we conceive this to be the
best and only ground to argue what they will be, now that that power has
ceased. ‘Why so, being gone, they are themselves again.’ It appears to
us, that some very romantic and extravagant expectations were
entertained from the destruction of the tyranny of Bonaparte. It is
true, his violence and ambition for a while suspended all other projects
of the same kind. ‘The right divine of kings to govern wrong’ was
wrested from the puny hands of its legitimate possessors, and strangely
monopolized by one man. The regular professors of the regal art were set
aside by the superior skill and prowess of an adventurer. They became in
turn the tools, or the victims of the machinations of the maker and
puller-down of kings. Instead of their customary employment of annoying
their neighbours, or harassing their subjects, they had enough to do to
defend their territories and their titles. The aggressions which they
had securely meditated against the independence of nations, and their
haughty contempt for the liberties of mankind, were retorted on their
own heads. The poisoned chalice was returned to their own lips. They
then first felt the sting of injustice, and the bitterness of scorn.
They saw how weak and little they were in themselves. They were roused
from the still life of courts, and forced to assume the rank of men.
They appealed to their people to defend their thrones; they called on
them to rally round the altar of their country; they invoked the name of
liberty, and in that name they conquered. Plans of national
aggrandisement or private revenge were forgotten in the intoxication of
triumph, as they had been in the agony of despair. This sudden
usurpation had so overpowered the imaginations of men, that they began
to consider it as the only evil that had ever existed in the world, and
that with it, all tyranny and ambition would cease. War was talked of as
if it had been an invention of the modern Charlemagne, and the Golden
age was to be restored with the Bourbons. But it is hard for the great
and mighty to learn in the school of adversity: emperors and kings bow
reluctantly to the yoke of necessity. When the panic is over, they will
be glad to drink of the cup of oblivion. The false idols which had been
set up to Liberty and Nature, to Genius and Fortune, are thrown down,
and they have once more ‘all power given them upon earth.’ How they are
likely to use it, whether for the benefit and happiness of mankind, or
to gratify their own prejudices and passions, we have, in one or two
instances, seen already. No one will in future look for ‘the milk of
human kindness’ in the Crown Prince of Sweden, who is a monarch of the
new school; nor for examples of romantic generosity and gratitude in
Ferdinand of Spain, who is one of the old. A jackal or baboon, dandled
in the paws of a royal Bengal tiger, may not be very formidable; but it
would be idle to suppose, if they should providentially escape, that
they would become tame, useful, domestic animals.
The King of Prussia has recovered the sword of the Great Frederick, his
humane, religious, moral, and unambitious predecessor, only, as it
appears, to unsheath it against the King of Saxony, his old companion in
arms. The Emperor of Austria seems eager to catch at the iron crown of
Italy, which has just fallen from the brows of his son-in-law. The King
of France, _our_ King of France, Louis the Desired, and who by the ‘all
hail hereafter,’ is to receive the addition of Louis the Wise, has
improved his reflections during a twenty years’ exile, into a humane and
amiable sanction of the renewal of the Slave Trade for five years only.
His Holiness the Pope, happy to have escaped from the clutches of the
arch-tyrant and impostor, employs his leisure hours in restoring the
order of the Jesuits, and persecuting the Freemasons. Ferdinand, the
grateful and the enlightened, who has passed through the same discipline
of humanity with the same effect, shuts up the doors of the Cortes, (as
it is scandalously asserted, at the instigation of Lord Wellington), and
throws open those of the Inquisition. At all this, the romantic admirers
of patriot kings, who fondly imagined that the hatred of the oppressor
was the same thing as the hatred of oppression, (among these we presume
we may reckon the poet-laureat,) hang their heads, and live in hope of
better times. To us it is all natural, and in order. From this grand
gaol-delivery of princes and potentates, we could expect nothing else
than a recurrence to their old habits and favourite principles. These
observations have not been hastily or gratuitously obtruded: they have
been provoked by a succession of disgusting and profligate acts of
inconsistency and treachery, unredeemed by a single effort of heroic
virtue or generous enthusiasm. Almost every principle, almost every
profession, almost every obligation, has been broken. If any proof is
wanting, look at Norway, look at Italy, look at Spain, look at the
Inquisition, look at the Slave Trade. The mask of liberty has been taken
off by most of the principal performers; the whining cant of humanity is
no longer heard in _The Courier_ and _The Times_. What then remains for
us to build a hope upon, but the Whig principles of the Prince Regent,
inherited from his ancestors, and the good nature of the Emperor of
Russia, the merit of which is entirely his own? Of the former of these
personages, our opinion is so well known, that we need not repeat it
here. Again, of the good intentions of the last-mentioned sovereign, we
declare that we have as full a persuasion. We believe him to be docile
to instruction, inquisitive after knowledge, and inclined to good. But
it has been said by those who have better means of information than
ourselves, that he is too open to the suggestions of those about him;
that, like other learners, he thinks the newest opinion the best, and
that his real good-nature and want of duplicity render him not
sufficiently proof against the selfish or sinister designs of others. He
has certainly a character for disinterestedness and magnanimity to
support in history: but history is a glass in which few minds fashion
themselves. If in his late conduct there was any additional impulse
given to the natural simplicity of his character, it probably arose from
an obvious desire to furnish a contrast to the character of Bonaparte,
and also to redeem the Russian character, hitherto almost another name
for barbarity and ferociousness, in the eyes of civilized Europe. In
this point of view, we should not despair that something may be
attempted, at least with respect to Poland, by the present autocrat of
all the Russias, to blot out certain stains on the reputation of his
grand-mother, the Empress Catherine.
With regard to Norway, the only hope of the suspension of its fate seems
to arise out of a very natural, if not laudable jealousy and distaste,
which have been conceived by some of the old-standing sovereigns of
Europe against the latest occupier and most forward pretender to
thrones. An adventurer who has made a fortune by gaining a prize in the
lottery, or by laying _qui tam_ informations against his accomplices,
cannot expect to be admitted, on an equality, into the company of
persons of regular character and family estates. The Emperor of Austria,
in particular, may have additional motives of dislike to Bernadotte,
connected with late events; and we agree with the _Examiner_, that he
may, in the end, ‘have to regret the length to which he was hurried
against a man, who was the key-stone of all the new power which had been
built on the ruin of thrones.’
As to any immediate adjustment of the maritime rights of this country,
on general principles, satisfactory to all parties, we see no reason to
expect it. We think the following paragraph justifies us in this
opinion. ‘We are told,’ says the _Morning Chronicle_, ‘that on the day
when the capture of the city of Washington, and the demolition of its
public buildings reached Paris, the Duke of Wellington had a ball: not
one public ambassador of the potentates of Europe, our good allies,
presented himself to congratulate his grace on the event.’ We here see,
on one side, the most absurd expectations of disinterested sympathy with
our national feelings, and as little disposition to enter into them on
the other. It is strange that the above paragraph should have found its
way into a paper which makes an almost exclusive profession of liberal
and comprehensive views.
Nor can we indulge in any serious expectations of ‘the immediate and
general abolition of the Slave Trade.’ Africa has little to hope from
‘the prevailing gentle arts’ of Lord Castlereagh. However sturdy he may
be in asserting our maritime rights, he will, we imagine, go to sleep
over those of humanity, and waking from his _doux sommeil_, find that
the dexterous prince of political jugglers has picked his pocket of his
African petitions, if, indeed, he chuses to carry the credentials of his
own disgrace about with him. There are two obstacles to the success of
this measure. In the first place, France has received such forcible
lessons from this country on the old virtues of patriotism and loyalty,
that she must feel particularly unwilling to be dictated to on the new
doctrines of liberality and humanity. Secondly, the abolition of the
Slave Trade, on our part, was itself the act of Mr. Fox’s
administration—an administration which we should suppose there is no
very strong inclination to relieve from any part of the contempt or
obloquy which it has been the fashion to pour upon it, by extending the
benefit of its measures, or recommending the adoption of its principles.
There is another point, on which, though our doubts are by no means
strong or lasting, we do not at all times feel the same absolute
confidence—the continuance of the present order of things in France. The
principles adhered to in the determination of some of the preceding
arrangements, and the permanent views which shall appear to actuate the
other powers of Europe, may have no inconsiderable influence on this
great question. Whatever tends to allay the ferment in men’s minds, and
to take away just causes of recrimination and complaint, must, of
course, lessen the pretexts for change. We should not, however, be more
disposed to augur such a change from the remaining attachment of
individuals, or of the army, to Bonaparte, than from the general
versatility and restlessness of the French character, and their total
want of settled opinion, which might oppose a check to military
enthusiasm. Even their present unqualified zeal, in the cause of the
Bourbons, is ominous. How long this sudden fit of gratitude, for
deliverance from evils certainly brought upon them by their slowness to
admit the remedy, may continue, it is impossible to say. A want of
_keeping_ is the distinguishing quality of the French character. A
people of this sort cannot be depended on for a moment. They are blown
about like a weathercock, with every breath of caprice or accident, and
would cry _vive l’empereur_ to-morrow, with as much vivacity and as
little feeling, as they do _vive le roi_ to-day. They have no fixed
principle of action. They are alike indifferent to every thing: their
self-complacency supplies the place of all other advantages—of virtue,
liberty, honour, and even of outward appearances. They are the only
people who are vain of being cuckolded and being conquered.—A people
who, after trampling over the face of Europe so long, fell down before
their assailants without striking a blow, and who boast of their
submission as a fine thing, are not a nation of men, but of women. The
spirit of liberty, at the Revolution, gave them an impulse common to
humanity; the genius of Bonaparte gave them the spirit of military
ambition. Both of these gave an energy and consistency to their
character, by concentrating their natural volatility on one great
object. But when both of these causes failed, the Allies found that
France consisted of nothing but ladies’ toilettes. The army are the
muscular part of the state; mere patriotism is a pasteboard visor, which
opposes no resistance to the sword. Whatever they determine will be
done; an effeminate public is a non-entity. They will not relish the
Bourbons long, if they remain at peace; and if they go to war, they will
want a monarch who is also a general.
THE LAY OF THE LAUREATE, CARMEN NUPTIALE, _by Robert Southey, Esq.,
Poet-Laureate, Member of the Royal Spanish Academy, and of the Royal
Spanish Academy of History_.—London, Longmans, 1816.
_Examiner_, _July 7, 1816_.
The dog which his friend Launce brought as a present to Madam Silvia in
lieu of a lap-dog, was something like ‘The Lay of the Laureate,’ which
Mr. Southey has here offered to the Princess Charlotte for a Nuptial
Song. It is ‘a very currish performance, and deserves none but currish
thanks.’ Launce thought his own dog, Crab, better than any other; and
Mr. Southey thinks his own praises the fittest compliment for a lady’s
ear. His Lay is ten times as long, and he thinks it is therefore ten
times better than an Ode of Mr. Pye’s.
Mr. Southey in this poem takes a tone which was never heard before in
a drawing-room. It is the first time that ever a Reformist was made a
Poet-laureate. Mr. Croker was wrong in introducing his old friend, the
author of ‘Joan of Arc,’ at Carlton-House. He might have known how it
would be. If we had doubted the good old adage before, ‘Once a Jacobin
and always a Jacobin,’ since reading ‘The Lay of the Laureate,’ we are
sure of it. A Jacobin is one who would have his single opinion govern
the world, and overturn every thing in it. Such a one is Mr. Southey.
Whether he is a Republican or a Royalist,—whether he hurls up the red
cap of liberty, or wears the lily, stained with the blood of all his
old acquaintance, at his breast,—whether he glories in Robespierre or
the Duke of Wellington—whether he pays a visit to Old Sarum, or makes
a pilgrimage to Waterloo,—whether he is praised by _The Courier_, or
parodied by Mr. Canning,—whether he thinks a King the best or the
worst man in his dominions,—whether he is a Theophilanthropist or a
Methodist of the church of England,—whether he is a friend of
Universal Suffrage and Catholic Emancipation, or a Quarterly
Reviewer,—whether he insists on an equal division of lands, or of
knowledge,—whether he is for converting infidels to Christianity, or
Christians to infidelity,—whether he is for pulling down the kings of
the East or those of the West,—whether he sharply sets his face
against all establishments, or maintains that whatever is, is
right,—whether he prefers what is old to what is new, or what is new
to what is old,—whether he believes that all human evil is remediable
by human means, or makes it out to himself that a Reformer is worse
than a housebreaker,—whether he is in the right or the wrong, poet or
prose-writer, courtier or patriot,—he is still the same pragmatical
person—every sentiment or feeling that he has is nothing but the
effervescence of incorrigible overweening self-opinion. He not only
thinks whatever opinion he may hold for the time infallible, but that
no other is even to be tolerated, and that none but knaves and fools
can differ with him. ‘The friendship of the good and wise is his.’ If
any one is so unfortunate as to hold the same opinions that he himself
formerly did, this but aggravates the offence by irritating the
jealousy of his self-love, and he vents upon them a double portion of
his spleen. Such is the constitutional slenderness of his
understanding, its ‘glassy essence,’ that the slightest collision of
sentiment gives an irrecoverable shock to him. He regards a Catholic
or a Presbyterian, a Deist or an Atheist, with equal repugnance, and
makes no difference between the Pope, the Turk, and the Devil. He
thinks a rival poet a bad man, and would suspect the principles,
moral, political, and religious, of any one who did not spell the word
_laureate_ with an _e_ at the end of it.—If Mr. Southey were a bigot,
it would be well; but he has only the intolerance of bigotry. His
violence is not the effect of attachment to any principles,
prejudices, or paradoxes of his own, but of antipathy to those of
others. It is an impatience of contradiction, an unwillingness to
share his opinions with others, a captious monopoly of wisdom,
candour, and common sense. He is not an enthusiast in religion, but he
is an enemy to philosophers; he does not respect old establishments,
but he hates new ones; he has no objection to regicides, but he is
inexorable against usurpers; he will tell you that ‘the re-risen cause
of evil’ in France yielded to ‘the Red Cross and Britain’s arm of
might,’ and shortly after he denounces this Red Cross as the scarlet
whore of Babylon, and warns Britain against her eternal malice and
poisoned cup; he calls on the Princess Charlotte in the name of the
souls of ten thousand little children, who are without knowledge in
_this age of light_, ‘SAVE OR WE PERISH,’ and yet sooner than they
should be saved by Joseph Fox or Joseph Lancaster, he would see them
damned; he would go himself into Egypt and pull down ‘the barbarous
kings’ of the East, and yet his having gone there on this very errand
is not among the least of Bonaparte’s crimes; he would ‘abate the
malice’ of the Pope and the Inquisition, and yet he cannot contain the
fulness of his satisfaction at the fall of the only person who had
both the will and the power to do this. Mr. Southey began with a
decent hatred of kings and priests, but it yielded to his greater
hatred of the man who trampled them in the dust. He does not feel much
affection to those who are born to thrones, but that any one should
gain a throne as he has gained the laureate-wreath, by superior merit
alone, was the unpardonable sin against Mr. Southey’s levelling Muse!
The poetry of the Lay is beneath criticism; it has all sorts of obvious
common-place defects, without any beauties either obvious or recondite.
It is the Namby-Pamby of the Tabernacle; a Methodist sermon turned into
doggrel verse. It is a gossipping confession of Mr. Southey’s political
faith—the ‘Practice of Piety’ or the ‘Whole Duty of Man’ mixed up with
the discordant slang of the metaphysical poets of the nineteenth
century. Not only do his sentiments every where betray the old
Jacobinical leaven, the same unimpaired desperate unprincipled spirit of
partisanship, regardless of time, place, and circumstance, and of every
thing but its own headstrong will; there is a gipsey jargon in the
expression of his sentiments which is equally indecorous. Does our
Laureate think it according to court-etiquette that he should be as
old-fashioned in his language as in the cut of his clothes?—On the
present occasion, when one might expect a truce with impertinence, he
addresses the Princess neither with the fancy of the poet, the
courtier’s grace, nor the manners of a gentleman, but with the air of an
inquisitor or father-confessor. Geo. Fox, the Quaker, did not wag his
tongue more saucily against the Lord’s Anointed in the person of Charles
II., than our Laureate here assures the daughter of his Prince, that so
shall she prosper in this world and the next, as she minds what he says
to her. Would it be believed (yet so it is) that, in the excess of his
unauthorized zeal, Mr. Southey in one place advises the Princess
conditionally to rebel against her father? Here is the passage. The
Angel of the English church thus addresses the Royal Bride:-
‘Bear thou that great Eliza in thy mind,
Who from a wreck this fabric edified;
And HER who to a nation’s voice resigned,
When Rome in hope its wiliest engines plied,
_By her own heart and righteous Heaven approved,
Stood up against the Father whom she loved_.’
This is going a good way. Is it meant, that if the Prince Regent, ‘to a
nation’s voice resigned,’ should grant Catholic Emancipation in defiance
of the ‘Quarterly Review,’ Mr. Southey would encourage the Princess in
standing up against her father, in imitation of the pious and patriotic
daughter of James II.?
This quaint effusion of poetical fanaticism is divided into four parts,
the Proem, the Dream, the Epilogue, and L’Envoy. The Proem opens thus:—
‘There was a time when all my youthful thought
Was of the Muse; and of the Poet’s fame,
How fair it flourisheth and fadeth not, ...
Alone enduring, when the Monarch’s name
Is but an empty sound, the Conqueror’s bust
Moulders and is forgotten in the dust.’
This may be very true, but not so proper to be spoken in this place. Mr.
Southey may think himself a greater man than the Prince Regent, but he
need not go to Carlton-House to tell him so. He endeavours to prove that
the Prince Regent and the Duke of Wellington (put together) are greater
than Bonaparte, but then he is by his own rule greater than all three of
them. We have here perhaps the true secret of Mr. Southey’s excessive
anger at the late Usurper. If all his youthful thought was of his own
inborn superiority to conquerors or kings, we can conceive that
Bonaparte’s fame must have appeared a very great injustice done to his
pretensions; it is not impossible that the uneasiness with which he
formerly heard the names of Marengo, of Austerlitz, of Jena, of Wagram,
of Friedland, and of Borodino, may account for the industrious
self-complacency with which he harps upon those of Busaco, Vimiera,
Salamanca, Vittoria, Thoulouse, and Waterloo; and that the Iron Crown of
Italy must have pressed upon his (Mr. Southey’s) brows, with a weight
most happily relieved by the light laureate-wreath! We are justified in
supposing Mr. Southey capable of envying others, for he supposes others
capable of envying him. Thus he sings of himself and his office:—
‘Yea in this now, while malice frets her hour,
Is foretaste given me of that meed divine;
Here undisturbed in this sequestered bower,
The friendship of the good and wise is mine;
And that green wreath which decks the Bard when dead,
That laureate garland crowns my living head.
That wreath which in Eliza’s golden days
My master dear, divinest Spenser, wore,
That which rewarded Drayton’s learned lays,
Which thoughtful Ben and gentle Daniel[17] bore ...
Grin, Envy, through thy ragged mask of scorn!
In honour it was given, with honour it is worn!’
Now we do assure Mr. Southey, that we do not envy him this honour. Many
people laugh at him, some may blush for him, but nobody envies him. As
to Spenser, whom he puts in the list of great men who have preceded him
in his office, his laureateship has been bestowed on him by Mr. Southey;
it did not ‘crown his living head.’ We all remember his being refused
the hundred pounds for his ‘Fairy Queen.’ Poets were not wanted in those
days to celebrate the triumphs of princes over the people. But why does
he not bring his list down nearer to his own time—to Pye and Whitehead
and Colley Cibber? Does Mr. Southey disdain to be considered as the
successor even of Dryden? That green wreath which decks our author’s
living head, is so far from being, as he would insinuate, an
anticipation of immortality, that it is no credit to any body, and least
of all to Mr. Southey. He might well have declined the reward of
exertions in a cause which throws a stigma of folly or something worse
on the best part of his life. Mr. Southey ought not to have received
what would not have been offered to the author of ‘Joan of Arc.’
Mr. Southey himself maintains that his song has still been ‘to Truth and
Freedom true’; that he has never changed his opinions; that it is the
cause of French liberty that has left him, not he the cause. That may be
so. But there is one person in the kingdom who has, we take it, been at
least as consistent in his conduct and sentiments as Mr. Southey, and
that person is the King. Thus the Laureate emphatically advises the
Princess:—
‘Look to thy Sire, and _in his steady way,
As in his Father’s he_, learn thou to tread.’
Now the question is, whether Mr. Southey agreed with his Majesty on the
subject of the French Revolution when he published ‘Joan of Arc.’ Though
Mr. Southey ‘as beseems him well’ congratulates the successes of the
son, we do not recollect that he condoled with the disappointments of
the father in the same cause. The King has not changed, therefore Mr.
Southey has. The sun does not turn to the sun-flower; but the sun-flower
follows the sun. Our poet has thoughtlessly committed himself in the
above lines. He may be right in applauding that one sole purpose of his
Majesty’s reign which he formerly condemned: that he can be consistent
in applauding what he formerly condemned, is impossible. That his
majesty King George III. should make a convert of Mr. Southey rather
than Mr. Southey of George III. is probable for many reasons. The King
by siding with the cause of the people could not, like King William,
have gained a crown: Mr. Southey, by deserting it, has got a hundred
pounds a-year. A certain English ambassador, who had a long time resided
at the court of Rome, was on his return introduced at the levee of Queen
Caroline. This lady, who was almost as great a prig as Mr. Southey,
asked him why in his absence he did not try to make a convert of the
Pope to the Protestant religion. He answered, ‘Madam, the reason was
that I had nothing better to offer his Holiness than what he already has
in his possession.’ The Pope would no doubt have been of the same way of
thinking. This is the reason why kings, from sire to son, pursue ‘their
steady way,’ and are less changeable than canting cosmopolites.
THE LAY OF THE LAUREATE, CARMEN NUPTIALE, _by Robert Southey, Esq.
Poet-Laureate, Member of the Royal Spanish Academy, and of the Royal
Spanish Academy of History_.—London: Longmans, 1816.
(CONCLUDED.)
‘_Queen._ Hamlet, thou hast thy Father much offended.
‘_Hamlet._ Madam, you have my Father much offended.’
_July 14, 1816._
Though we do not think Mr. Southey has been quite consistent, we do not
think him a hypocrite. This poem proves it. How should he maintain the
same opinion all his life, when he cannot maintain it for two stanzas
together? The weakness of his reasoning shews that he is the dupe of it.
He has not the faculty of perceiving contradictions. He is not
accountable for his mistakes. There is not a single sentiment advanced
in any part of the _Lay_, which is not flatly denied in some other part
of it. Let us see:—
‘Proudly I raised the high thanksgiving strain
Of victory in a rightful cause achieved:
For which _I long had looked and not in vain,
As one who with firm faith and undeceived,
In history and the heart of man could find
Sure presage of deliverance for mankind_.’
Mr. Southey does not inform us in what year he began to look for this
deliverance, but if he had looked for it long, he must have looked for
it long in vain. Does our poet then find no presage of deliverance for
‘conquered France’ in the same principles that he found it for ‘injured
Germany’? But he has no principles; or he does not himself know what
they are. He praises Providence in this particular instance for having
conformed to his hopes; and afterwards thus gives us the general results
of his reading in history and the human heart. In the Dream he says,
speaking of Charissa and Speranza—
‘This lovely pair unrolled before the throne
“Earth’s melancholy map,” whereon to sight
Two broad divisions at a glance were shown,
The empires these of darkness and of light.
Well might the thoughtful bosom sigh to mark
How wide a portion of the map was dark.
Behold, Charissa cried, how large a space
Of earth lies unredeemed! Oh grief to think
That countless myriads of immortal race
In error born, in ignorance must sink,
Trained up in customs which corrupt the heart
And following miserably the evil part!
Regard the expanded Orient from the shores
Of scorched Arabia and the Persian sea,
To where the inhospitable Ocean roars
Against the rocks of frozen Tartary;
Look next at those Australian isles which lie
Thick as the stars which stud the wintry sky.
Then let thy mind contemplative survey
That spacious region where in elder time
Earth’s unremembered conquerors held the sway
And Science trusting in her skill sublime,
With lore abstruse the sculptured walls o’erspread,
Its import now forgotten with the dead.
From Nile and Congo’s undiscovered springs
To the four seas which gird the unhappy land,
Behold it left a prey to barbarous Kings,
The Robber and the Trader’s ruthless hand;
Sinning and suffering, everywhere unblest,
Behold her wretched sons, oppressing and opprest!’
This is ‘a pretty picture’ to be drawn by one who finds in the past
history of the world the sure presage of deliverance for mankind. We
grant indeed that Mr. Southey was right in one thing, viz. in expecting
from it that sort of ‘deliverance of mankind,’ bound hand and foot, into
the power of Kings and Priests, which has actually come to pass, and
which he has celebrated with so much becoming pomp, both here and
elsewhere. The doctrine of ‘millions made for one’ has to be sure got a
tolerable footing in the East. It has attained a very venerable old age
there—it is mature even to rottenness, but without decay. ‘Old, old,
Master Shallow,’ but eternal. It is transmitted down in unimpaired
succession from sire to son. Snug’s the word. Legitimacy is not there
militant, but triumphant, as the Editor of _The Times_ would wish. It is
long since the people had any thing to do with the laws but to obey
them, or any laws to obey but the will of their taskmasters. This is the
necessary end of legitimacy. The Princes and Potentates cut one
another’s throats as they please, but the people have no hand in it.
They have no French Revolutions there, no rights of man to terrify
barbarous kings, no republicans or levellers, no weathercock deliverers
and re-deliverers of mankind, no Mr. Southeys nor Mr. Wordsworths. In
this they are happy. Things there are perfectly settled, in the state in
which they should be,—still as death, and likely to remain so. Mr.
Southey’s exquisite reason for supposing that a crusade to pull down
divine right would succeed in the East, is that a crusade to prop it up
has just succeeded in the West. That will never do. Besides, what
security can he give, if he goes on improving in wisdom for the next
five and twenty years as he has done for the last, that he would not in
the end be as glad to see these ‘barbarous kings’ restored to their
rightful thrones, as he is now anxious to see them tumbled from them?
The doctrine of ‘divine right’ is of longer standing and more firmly
established in the East than in the West, because the Eastern world is
older than ours. We might say of it,
‘The wars it well remembers of King Nine,
Of old Assaracus and Inachus divine.’
It is fixed on the altar and the throne, safe, quite safe against Mr.
Southey’s enthusiasm in its second spring, his Missionary Societies, and
his Schools for All. It overlays that vast continent, like an ugly
incubus, sucking the blood and stopping up the breath of man’s life.
That detestable doctrine, which in England first tottered and fell
headless to the ground with the martyred Charles; which we kicked out
with his son James, and kicked twice back with two Pretenders, to make
room for ‘Brunswick’s fated line,’ a line of our own chusing, and for
that reason worth all Mr. Southey’s lines put together; that detestable
doctrine, which the French, in 1793, ousted from their soil,
thenceforward sacred in the eyes of humanity, which they ousted from it
again in 1815, making it doubly sacred; and which (oh grief, oh shame)
was borne into it once more on English shoulders, and thrust down their
throats with English bayonets; this detestable doctrine, which would, of
right and with all the sanctions of religion and morality, sacrifice the
blood of millions to the least of its prejudices; which would make the
rights, the happiness, and liberty of nations, from the beginning to the
end of time, dependent on the caprice of some of the lowest and vilest
of the species; which rears its bloated hideous form to brave the will
of a whole people; that claims mankind as its property, and allows human
nature to exist only upon sufferance; that haunts the understanding like
a frightful spectre, and oppresses the very air with a weight that is
not to be borne; this doctrine meets with no rubs, no reverses, no ups
and downs, in the East. It is there fixed, immutable. The Jaggernaut
there passes on with its ‘satiate’ scythe over the bleeding bodies of
its victims, who are all as loyal, as pious, and as thankful as Mr.
Southey. It meets with no opposition from any ‘re-risen cause of evil’
or of good. Mankind have there been delivered once for all!
In the passage above quoted, Mr. Southey founds his hope of the
emancipation of the Eastern world from ‘the Robber and the Trader’s
ruthless hand’ on our growing empire in India. This is a conclusion
which nobody would venture upon but himself. His last appeal is to
scripture, and still he is unfortunate:—
‘Speed thou the work, Redeemer of the World!
_That the long miseries of mankind may cease!_
Where’er the Red Cross banner is unfurled,
There let it carry truth, and light, and peace!
_Did not the Angels who announced thy birth,
Proclaim it with the sound of Peace on Earth?_’
From the length of time that this prediction has remained unfulfilled,
Mr. Southey thinks its accomplishment must be near. His Odes will not
hasten the event.
Again, we do not understand the use which Mr. Southey makes of Red Cross
in this poem. For speaking of himself he says,
‘And when that last and most momentous hour
Beheld the re-risen cause of evil yield
To the Red Cross and England’s arm of power,
I sung of Waterloo’s unrivalled field,
Paying the tribute of a soul embued
With deepest joy, devout and awful gratitude.’
This passage occurs in the Proem. In the Dream the Angel of the English
Church is made to warn the Princess—
‘Think not that lapse of ages shall abate
The inveterate malice of that Harlot old;
Fallen tho’ thou deemest her from her high estate,
She proffers still the envenomed cup of gold,
And her fierce Beast, whose names are blasphemy,
The same that was, is still, and still must be.’
It is extraordinary that both these passages relate to one and the same
thing, namely, Popery, which our author in the first identifies with the
Christian religion, thus invoking to his aid every pure feeling or pious
prejudice in the minds of his readers, and in the last denounces as that
Harlot old, ‘whose names are blasphemy,’ with all the fury of plenary
inspiration. This is a great effort of want of logic. Mr. Southey will
hardly sing or say that it was to establish Protestantism in France that
England’s arm of power was extended on this occasion. Nor was it simply
to establish Popery. That existed there already. It was to establish
‘the inveterate malice of that Harlot old,’ her ‘envenomed cup,’ to give
her back her daggers and her fires, her mummeries, her holy oil, her
power over the bodies and the minds of men, to restore her ‘the same
that she was, is still, and still must be,’ that that celebrated fight
was fought. The massacres of Nismes followed hard upon the triumph of
Mr. Southey’s Red Cross. The blood of French Protestants began to flow
almost before the wounds of the dying and the dead in that memorable
carnage had done festering. This was the most crying injustice, the most
outrageous violation of principle, that ever was submitted to. What! has
John Bull nothing better to do now-a-days than to turn bottle-holder to
the Pope of Rome, to whet his daggers for him, to light his fires, and
fill his poisoned bowl; and yet, out of pure complaisance (a quality
John has learnt from his new friends the Bourbons) not venture a
syllable to say that we did not mean him to use them? It seems Mr.
Southey did not think this a fit occasion for the interference of his
Red Cross Muse. Could he not trump up a speech either for ‘divine
Speranza,’ or ‘Charissa dear,’ to lay at the foot of the throne? Was the
Angel of the English Church dumb too—‘quite chopfallen?’ Yet though our
Laureate cannot muster resolution enough to advise the Prince to protect
Protestants in France, he plucks up spirit enough to urge him to
persecute Catholics in this country, and pretty broadly threatens him
with the consequences, if he does not. “’Tis much,” as Christopher Sly
says.
There is another subject on which Mr. Southey’s silence is still more
inexcusable. It was understood to be for his exertions in the cause of
Spanish liberty that he was made Poet-Laureate. It is then high time for
him to resign. Why has he not written a single ode to a single Spanish
patriot who has been hanged, banished, imprisoned, sent to the galleys,
assassinated, tortured? It must be pleasant to those who are suffering
under the thumb-screw to read Mr. Southey’s thoughts upon that ingenious
little instrument of royal gratitude. Has he discovered that the air of
a Court does not very well agree with remonstrances against acts of
oppression and tyranny, when exercised by those who are born for no
other purpose? Is his patriotism only a false cover, a Carlton-House
convenience? His silence on this subject is not equivocal. Whenever Mr.
Southey shews the sincerity of his former professions of zeal in behalf
of Spanish liberty, by writing an elegy on the death of Porlier, or a
review of the conduct of Ferdinand VII. (he is a subject worthy of Mr.
Southey’s prose style), or by making the lame tailor of Madrid (we
forget his name) the subject of an epic poem, we will retract all that
we have said in disparagement of his consistency—_But not till then_.
We meant to have quoted several other passages, such as that in which
old Praxis, that is, Experience, recommends it to the Princess to
maintain the laws by keeping all that is old, and adding all that is new
to them—that in which he regrets the piety and learning of former times,
and then promises us a release from barbarism and brutishness by the
modern invention of Sunday Schools—that in which he speaks of his own
virtues and the wisdom of his friends—that in which he undertakes to
write a martyrology.—But we are very tired of the subject, and the
verses are not worth quoting. There is a passage in Racine which is; and
with that, we take our leave of the Laureate, to whom it may convey some
useful hints in explanation of his ardent desire for the gibbeting of
Bonaparte and the burning of Paris:—
_Nabal._—Que peut vous inspirer une haine si forte?
Est-ce que de Baal le zèle vous transporte?
Pour moi, vous le savez, descendu d’Ismaël,
Je ne sers ni Baal ni le Dieu d’Israel.
_Mathan._—Ami, peux-tu penser que d’un zèle frivole
Je me laisse aveugler pour une vaine idole!
Né ministre du Dieu qu’en ce temple on adore,
Peut-être que Mathan le serviroit encore,
Si l’amour des grandeurs, la soif de commander,
Avec son joug étroit pouvoient s’accommoder.
Qu’est-il besoin, Nabal, qu’à tes yeux je rappelle
De Joad et de moi la fameuse querelle?
Vaincu par lui j’entrai dans une autre carrière,
Et mon âme à la cour s’attacha tout entière.
J’approchai par degrés l’oreille des rois;
Et bientôt en oracle on érigea ma voix.
J’étudiai leur cœur, je flattai leurs caprices,
Je leur semai de fleurs le bord des précipices:
Près de leurs passions rien ne me fut sacré;
De mesure et de poids je changeois à leur gré,
Autant que de Joad l’inflexible rudesse
De leur superbe oreille offensoit la mollesse;
Autant je les charmois par ma dextérité,
Dérobant à leurs yeux la triste vérité,
Prêtant à leur fureur des couleurs favorables,
Et prodigue surtout du sang des misérables.[18]
* * * * *
Déserteur de leur loi, j’approuvai l’entreprise,
Et par là de Baal méritai la prêtrise;
Par là je me rendis terrible à mon rival,
Je ceignis la tiare, et marchai son égal.
Toutefois, je l’avoue, en ce comble de gloire,
De Dieu que j’ai quitté l’importune mémoire
Jette encore en mon âme un reste de terreur;
Et c’est ce qui redouble et nourrit ma fureur.
Heureux, si sur son temple achevant ma vengeance,
Je puis convaincre enfin sa haine d’impuissance,
Et parmi les débris, les ravages, et les morts,
A force d’attentats perdre tous mes remords.[19]
TO THE EDITOR OF THE EXAMINER
Sir,—I hope you will not omit to notice two passages in Mr. Southey’s
poem, in which, to try his talent at natural description, he gives an
account of two of ‘the fearfullest wild-fowl living’—a British Lion and
a Saxon one. Both are striking likenesses, and would do to hang on the
outside of Exeter-‘Change to invite the curious. The former (presumed
not to be indigenous) is described to be in excellent case, well-fed,
getting in years and corpulent, with a high collar buried in the fat of
the neck, false mane, large haunches (for which this breed is
remarkable), paws like a shin of beef, large rolling eyes, a lazy,
lounging animal, sleeping all day and roaring all night, a great
devourer of carcases and breaker of bones, pleased after a full meal,
and his keepers not then afraid of him. Inclined to be uxorious. Visited
by all persons of distinction, from the highest characters abroad down
to the lowest at home.—The other portrait of the Saxon Lion is a
contrast to this. It is a poor lean starved beast, lord neither of men
nor lands, galled with its chain, which it has broken, but has not got
off from its neck. This portrait is, we understand, to be dedicated to
Lord Castlereagh.—Your constant reader,
NE QUID NIMIS.
‘A NEW VIEW OF SOCIETY; or, _Essays on the Principle of the Formation of
the Human Character, and the Application of the Principle to Practice_.’
Murray, 1816.—‘AN ADDRESS TO THE INHABITANTS OF NEW LANARK, _on opening
an Institution for the Formation of Character.’ By_ Robert Owen, _one of
his Majesty’s Justices of the Peace for the County of
Lanark_.’—Hatchard, 1816.
[‘Dedicated to those who have no Private Ends to accomplish, who are
honestly in search of Truth, for the purpose of ameliorating the
Condition of Society, and who have the firmness to follow the
Truth wherever it may lead, without being turned aside from the
Pursuit by the Prepossessions or Prejudices of any part of
Mankind;—to Mr. Wilberforce, the Prince Regent,’ &c.]
_August 4, 1816._
‘A _New_ View of Society’—No, Mr. Owen, that we deny. It may be true,
but it is not new. It is not coeval, whatever the author and proprietor
may think, with the New Lanark mills, but it is as old as the royal
borough of Lanark, or as the county of Lanark itself. It is as old as
the ‘Political Justice’ of Mr. Godwin, as the ‘Oceana’ of Harrington, as
the ‘Utopia’ of Sir Thomas More, as the ‘Republic’ of Plato; it is as
old as society itself, and as the attempts to reform it by shewing what
it ought to be, or by teaching that the good of the whole is the good of
the individual—an opinion by which fools and honest men have been
sometimes deceived, but which has never yet taken in the knaves and
knowing ones. The doctrine of Universal Benevolence, the belief in the
Omnipotence of Truth, and in the Perfectibility of Human Nature, are not
new, but ‘Old, old,’ Master Robert Owen;—why then do you say that they
are new? They are not only old, they are superannuated, they are dead
and buried, they are reduced to mummy, they are put into the catacombs
at Paris, they are sealed up in patent coffins, they have been dug up
again and anatomised, they have been drawn, quartered and gibbetted,
they have become black, dry, parched in the sun, loose, and rotten, and
are dispersed to all the winds of Heaven! The chain in which they hung
up the murdered corse of human Liberty is all that remains of it, and my
Lord Shallow keeps the key of it! If Mr. Owen will get it out of his
hands, with the aid of Mr. Wilberforce and the recommendation of _The
Courier_, we will ‘applaud him to the very echo, which shall applaud
again.’ Till then, we must content ourselves with ‘chaunting remnants of
old lauds’ in the manner of Ophelia:—
‘No, no, he is gone, and we cast away moan,
And will he not come again,
And will he not come again?’
Perhaps, one of these days, he may ... ‘like a cloud over the Caspian’:
then if ever, and never till then, human nature will hold up its head
again, and the holy and Triple Alliance will be dissolved. But as to
this bald spectre of Liberty and Necessity conjured up by Mr. Owen from
the falls of the Clyde, with a primer in one hand, and a spinning-jenny
in the other, coming down from the Highlands in a Scotch mist, and
discoverable only by second-sight, we may fairly say to it—
‘Thy bones are marrowless, thy blood is cold;
Thou hast no speculation in those eyes,
Which thou dost glare with.’
Why does Mr. Owen put the word ‘New,’ in black-letter at the head of the
advertisements of his plan of reform? In what does the New Lanark differ
from the old Utopia? Is Scotland, after all, the true Lubber-land? Or
must the whole world be converted into a cotton-factory? Does not Mr.
Owen know that the same scheme, the same principles, the same philosophy
of motives and actions, of causes and consequences, of knowledge and
virtue, of virtue and happiness, were rife in the year 1793, were noised
abroad then, were spoken on the house-tops, were whispered in secret,
were published in quarto and duodecimo, in political treatises, in
plays, poems, songs, and romances—made their way to the bar, crept into
the church, ascended the rostrum, thinned the classes of the
universities, and robbed ‘Durham’s golden stalls’ of their hoped-for
ornaments, by sending our aspiring youth up to town to learn philosophy
of the new teachers of philosophy; that these ‘New Views of Society’ got
into the hearts of poets and the brains of metaphysicians, took
possession of the fancies of boys and women, and turned the heads of
almost the whole kingdom: but that there was one head which they never
got possession of, that turned the heads of the whole kingdom round
again, stopped the progress of philosophy and necessity by wondrous
fortitude, and that ‘thus repelled, _philosophy_ fell into a sadness,
then into a fast, thence to a watching, then into a weakness, thence to
a lightness, and by this declension, to the lamentable state wherein it
now lies,’ hooted by the boys, laughed at by the women, spit at by
fools, trod upon by knaves, damned by poet-laureates, whined over by
maudlin metaphysicians, rhymed upon by mincing ballad-makers, ridiculed
in romances, belied in histories and travels, pelted by the mob, sneered
at by the court, driven from the country, kicked out of society, and
forced to take refuge and to lie snug for twenty years in the New Lanark
mills, with the connivance of the worthy proprietor, among the tow and
spindles; from whence he lets us understand that it is coming up again
to Whitehall-stairs, like a spring-tide with the full of the moon, and
floating on the blood that has flowed for the restoration of the
Bourbons, under the patronage of the nobility, the gentry, Mr.
Wilberforce, and the Prince Regent, and all those who are governed, like
these great personages, by no other principle than truth, and no other
wish than the good of mankind! This puff will not take with us: we are
old birds, not to be caught with chaff: we shall not purchase in this
new lottery, where there are all prizes and no blanks! We are inclined
to throw Mr. Owen’s ‘New View,’ behind the fire-place, as we believe
most people do the letter they receive from the proprietors of the lucky
lottery-office, informing them that their ticket was drawn a blank the
first day, and in the postscript soliciting their future favours!
Mr. Owen may think that we have all this while been jesting, when we
have been in sad and serious earnest. Well, then, we will give him the
reason why we differ with him, out of ‘an old saw,’ as good as most
‘modern instances.’ It is contained in this sentence:—‘If to do were as
easy as to teach others what were good to be done, chapels had been
churches, and poor men’s cottages princes’ palaces.’ Our author has
discovered no new theory; he has advanced no new reasons. The former
reasons were never answered, but the plan did not succeed. Why then does
he think _his_ must? All that he has done has been to leave out the
reasons for his paradoxes, and to give his conclusions in capitals. This
may take for a time with Mr. Wilberforce and the Methodists, who like
hieroglyphics, but it cannot last. Here is a plan, strange as it may
seem, ‘a new View of Society,’ published by two of our most loyal
booksellers, and what is still more extraordinary, puffed in _The
Courier_ as an extremely practical, practicable, solid, useful, and good
sort of work, which proposes no less than to govern the world without
religion and without law, by the force of reason alone! This project is
in one of its branches dedicated to the Prince Regent, by which (if
carried into effect) he would be stuck up in his life-time as ‘a useless
piece of antiquity’; and in another part is dedicated to Mr.
Wilberforce, though it would by the same rule convert that little vital
member of the community into ‘a monkey preacher,’ crying in the
wilderness with no one to hear him, and sneaking about between his
character and his conscience, in a state of ludicrous perplexity, as
indeed he always appears to be at present! What is most remarkable is,
that Mr. Owen is the first philosopher we ever heard of, who recommended
himself to the great by telling them disagreeable truths. A man that
comes all the way from the banks of the Clyde acquires a projectile
force that renders him irresistible. He has access, we understand, to
the men in office, to the members of parliament, to lords and gentlemen.
He comes to ‘pull an old house about their ears,’ to batter down all
their establishments, new or old, in church or in state, civil,
political, and military, and he quietly walks into their houses with his
credentials in his pocket, and reconciles them to the prospect of the
innumerable Houses of Industry he is about to erect on the site of their
present sinecures, by assuring them of the certainty of his principles
and the infallibility of his practice, in building up and pulling down.
His predecessors were clumsy fellows; but he is an engineer, who will be
sure to do their business for them. He is not the man to set the Thames
on fire, but he will move the world, and New Lanark is the place he has
fixed his lever upon for this purpose. To shew that he goes roundly to
work with great people in developing his formidable system of the
formation of character, he asks, p. 7 of the second Essay,—
‘How much longer shall we continue to allow generation after generation
to be taught crime from their infancy, and when so taught, hunt them
like beasts of the forest, until they are entangled beyond escape in the
toils and nets of the law? When, if the circumstances from youth of
these poor unpitied sufferers had been reversed with those who are even
surrounded with the pomp and dignity of justice, these latter would have
been at the bar of the culprit, and the former would have been in the
judgment-seat.
‘Had the present Judges of these realms, whose conduct compels the
admiration of surrounding states, been born and educated in St. Giles’s,
or some similar situation, is it not reasonable to conclude, as they
possess native energies and abilities, that ere this they would have
been at the head of their _then_ profession, and in consequence of that
superiority and proficiency, have already suffered imprisonment,
transportation, or death? Or can we for a moment hesitate to decide,
that if some of those men whom our laws, dispensed by the present
Judges, have doomed to suffer capital punishment, had been born,
trained, and surrounded as these Judges were born, trained, and
surrounded; that some of those so imprisoned, transported, or hanged,
would have been the identical individuals who would have passed the same
awful sentences _on our present highly esteemed dignitaries of the
law_?’
This is a delicate passage. So then according to the author of the ‘New
View of Society,’ the Prince Regent of these realms, instead of being at
the head of the allied sovereigns of Europe, might, in other
circumstances, have been at the head of a gang of bravoes and assassins;
Lord Castlereagh, on the same principle, and by parity of reasoning,
without any alteration in his nature or understanding, but by the mere
difference of situation, might have been a second _Count Fathom_; Mr.
Vansittart, the chancellor of the exchequer, might, if he had turned his
hand that way in time, have succeeded on _the snaffling lay_, or as a
pickpocket; Lord Wellington might have entered houses, instead of
entering kingdoms, by force; the Lord-chancellor might have been a
Jew-broker; the Marquis of —— or Lord —— a bawd, and their sons,
tapsters and bullies at bagnios; the Queen (God bless her) might have
been an old washer-woman, taking her snuff and gin among her gossips,
and her daughters, if they had not been princesses, might have turned
out no better than they should be! Here’s a levelling rogue for you! The
world turned inside out, with a witness!—Such are Mr. Owen’s general
principles, to which we have nothing to say, and such his mode of
illustrating them in his prefaces and dedications, which we do not think
the most flattering to persons in power. We do not, however, wish him to
alter his tone: he goes swimmingly on at present, ‘with cheerful and
confident thoughts.’ His schemes thus far are tolerated, because they
are remote, visionary, inapplicable. Neither the great world nor the
world in general care any thing about New Lanark, nor trouble themselves
whether the workmen there go to bed drunk or sober, or whether the
wenches are got with child before or after the marriage ceremony. Lanark
is distant, Lanark is insignificant. Our statesmen are not afraid of the
perfect system of reform he talks of, and, in the meantime, his cant
against reform in parliament, and about Bonaparte, serves as a practical
diversion in their favour. But let the good which Mr. Owen says he has
done in one poor village be in danger of becoming general,—let his plan
for governing men by reason, without the assistance of the dignitaries
of the church and the dignitaries of the law, but once get wind and be
likely to be put in practice, and his dreams of elevated patronage will
vanish. Long before he has done as much to overturn bigotry and
superstition in this country, as he says Bonaparte did on the continent,
(though he thinks the restoration of what was thus overturned also a
great blessing) Mr. Wilberforce will have cut his connection. When we
see Mr. Owen brought up for judgment before Lord Ellenborough, or
standing in the pillory, we shall begin to think there is something in
this _New Lanark Scheme_ of his. On the other hand, if he confines
himself to general principles, steering clear of practice, the result
will be the same, if ever his principles become sufficiently known and
admired. Let his ‘New View of Society’ but make as many disciples as the
‘Enquiry concerning Political Justice,’ and we shall soon see how the
tide will turn about. There will be a fine hue and cry raised by all
_the good and wise_, by all ‘those acute minds’ who, Mr. Owen tells us,
have not been able to find a flaw in his reasonings, but who will soon
discover a flaw in his reputation. Dr. Parr will preach a Spital sermon
against him; lectures will be delivered in Lincoln’s Inn Hall, to prove
that a perfect man is such another chimera as a golden mountain; Mr.
Malthus will set up his two checks of vice and misery as insuperable
bars against him; Mr. Southey will put him into the ‘Quarterly Review’;
his name will be up in the newspapers, _The Times_, _The Courier_, and
_The Morning Post_; the three estates will set their faces against him;
he will be marked as a Jacobin, a leveller, an incendiary, in all parts
of the three kingdoms; he will be avoided by his friends, and become a
bye-word to his enemies; his brother magistrates of the county of Lanark
will refuse to sit on the bench with him; the spindles of his
spinning-jennies will no longer turn on their soft axles; he will have
gone out for wool, and will go home shorn; and he will find that it is
not so easy or safe a task as he imagined to make fools wise, and knaves
honest; in short, to make mankind understand their own interests, or
those who govern them care for any interest but their own. Otherwise,
all this matter would have been settled long ago. As it is, things will
most probably go on as they have done, till some comet comes with its
tail; and on the eve of some grand and radical reform, puts an end to
the question.
THE SPEECH OF CHARLES C. WESTERN, Esq. M.P. _on the Distressed State of
the Agriculture of the Country, delivered in the House of Commons, March
7, 1816_.
THE SPEECH OF HENRY BROUGHAM, Esq. M.P. _on the same subject, delivered
in the same place, April 9, 1816_.
This is a sore subject; and it is here handled with much tenderness and
delicacy. It puts one in mind of the traveller’s nose, and the nuns of
Strasburgh, in the tale of Slaukenbergius. ‘I will touch it, said one; I
dare not touch it, said another; I wish I had touched it, said a third;
let me touch it, said a fourth.’ While the gentlewomen were debating the
point, the traveller with the great nose rode on. It would be no
ungracious task to treat of the distresses of the country, if all were
distressed alike; but that is not the case; nor is it possible to trace
the necessities of one part of the community to their source, or to hint
at a remedy, without glancing invidiously at the superfluities of
others. ‘Aye, there’s the rub, that makes calamity of so long life.’ The
speeches before us are to the subject what a veil is to a lady’s face,
or a blind to a window. Almost all that has been said or written upon it
is a palpable delusion—an attempt to speak out and say nothing; to
oppose something that might be done, and propose something that cannot
be done; to direct attention to the subject, and divert it from it; to
do something and nothing; and to come to this potent conclusion, that
while nothing _is done_, nothing _can be done_. ‘But have you then any
remedy to propose instead?’ What sort of a remedy do you mean? ‘Oh, one
equally safe and efficacious, that shall set every thing to rights, and
leave every thing just as it is, that does not touch either the tythes
or the national debt, nor places and pensions, nor property of any kind,
except the poor’s fund; _that_ you may take from them to make them
independent of the rich, as you leave Lord Camden in possession of
thirty thousand a year to make him independent of the poor.’—Why, then,
what if the Lord Chancellor and the Chancellor of the Exchequer were to
play a game at push-pin on the top of St. Paul’s; or if Mr. Brougham and
Mr. Horner were to play at cat’s-cradle on the top of the Monument; or
if the little garden between the Speaker’s house and the river-side were
to be sown with pearls and cockle-shells? Or if——Pshaw! Patience, and
shuffle the cards.
The great problem of our great problem-finders appears to be, _to take
nothing from the rich, and give it to the poor_. That will never do. We
find them and their schemes of diversion well described in Rabelais,
book v. chap. xxii.
‘_How Queen Whim’s Officers were employed, and how the said Lady
retained us among her Abstractors._
‘I then saw a great number of the Queen’s officers, who made
blackamoors white, as fast as hops, just rubbing their bellies with
the bottom of a pannier.
‘Others, with three couples of foxes in one yoke, ploughed a sandy
shore, and did not lose their seed.
‘Others washed burnt tiles, and made them lose their colour.
‘Others extracted water out of pumice-stones, braying them a good
while in a mortar, and changed their substance.
‘Others sheered asses, and thus got long fleece wool.
‘Others gathered off of thorns grapes, and figs off of thistles.
‘Others stroked he-goats by the dugs, and saved their milk, and much
they got by it.
‘Others washed asses’ heads, without losing their soap.
‘Others taught cows to dance, and did not lose their fiddling.
‘Others pitched nets to catch the wind, and took cock lobsters in
them.
‘Others out of nothing made great things, and made great things
return to nothing.
‘Others made a virtue of necessity, and the best of a bad market;
which seemed to me a very good piece of work.
‘I saw two Gibroins by themselves, keeping watch on the top of a
tower; and we were told they guarded the moon from the wolves.’
The war has cost the country five or six hundred millions of money. This
has not been a nominal expense, a playing at ducks and drakes with the
King’s picture on the water, or a manufacturing of bank-notes, and then
lighting our pipes with them, but a real _bonâ fide_ waste of the means,
wealth, labour, produce, or resources of the country, in the carrying on
of the war. About one hundred of these five or six hundred millions have
been sent directly out of the country in loans to our Allies, from the
year 1793 to the year 1815, inclusive, during which period there is not
a single year in which we did not (from our desire of peace with the
legitimate government of that country) subsidise one or all of the
powers of Europe, to carry on war against the rebels, regicides,
republicans, and usurpers of France. Now the interest of this money
alone would be five millions yearly, which would be nearly enough to pay
the amount of the poor-rates of the whole country, which is seven
millions of our yearly taxes, or might at least be applied to mitigate
the mild severity of Mr. Malthus’s sweeping clauses on that defenceless
part of the subject. Here is a hundred millions then gone clean out of
the country: there are four or five hundred millions more which have
been sunk in the expenses of the war, and which might as well have been
sunk in the sea; or what has been saved out of the wreck by those who
have been most active in running the vessel aground, is in the hands of
persons who are in no hurry that the public should go snacks with them
in their excessive good fortune. In all three cases, and under each
several head of loans, waste, or monopoly, John Bull pays the piper, or
the interest of the whole money in taxes. He is just so many hundred
millions the worse for the war, (whoever may be the better for it) not
merely in paper, which would be nothing, nor in golden guineas, which
would be something; but in what is better and more substantial than
either, in goods and chattels, in the produce of the soil, and the work
of his hands—in the difference between what the industry of man, left to
itself, produces in time of peace for the benefit of man, and what the
same industry, under the direction of government, produces in time of
war for the destruction of others, without any benefit to himself, real,
imaginary, or pretended; we mean in a physical and economical point of
view, which is here the question—a question, which seems to last when
the religion, politics, and morality of the affair are over. We have
said that the expenses of the war might as well have been sunk in the
sea; and so they might, for they have been sunk in unproductive labour,
that is, in maintaining large establishments, and employing great
numbers of men in doing nothing or mischief; for example, in making
ships to destroy other ships, guns and gunpowder to blow out men’s
brains, pikes and swords to run them through the body, drums and fifes
to drown the noise of cannon and the whizzing of bullets; in making caps
and coats to deck the bodies of those who live by killing others; in
buying up pork and beef, butter and cheese, to enable them to do this
with more effect: in barracks, in transport-ships, in baggage and
baggage-waggons, in horses, bridles and saddles, in suttlers and
followers of the camp, in chaplains of the regiment, in common trulls,
and the mistresses of generals and commanders in chief; in contractors,
in army and navy agents, their partners, clerks, relations, dependants,
wives, families, servants in and out of livery, their town and country
houses, coaches, curricles, parks, gardens, grottos, hot-houses,
green-houses, pictures, statues, libraries; in treasury scribes, in
secretaries and under-secretaries of state, of the foreign, colonial,
and war departments, with their swarms of underlings, all of whom are
maintained out of the labour and sweat of the country, and for all of
whom, and for all that they do (put together) the country is not one pin
the better, or at least, one penny more in pocket, than if they were at
the bottom of the Channel. The present may have been the most just and
necessary war, in a political, moral, and religious point of view, that
ever was engaged in; but it has also been the most expensive; and what
is worse, the expense remains just the same, though it may have been the
most unjust and unnecessary in the world. We have paid for it, and we
must pay for it equally in either case, and wholly out of our own
pockets. The price of restoring the Pope, the Inquisition, the Bourbons,
and the doctrine of Divine Right, is half of our nine hundred millions
of debt. That is the amount of the government bill of costs, presented
to John Bull for payment, not of the principal but the interest; that is
what he has got by the war; the load of taxes at his back, with which he
comes out of his glorious five and twenty years’ struggle, like
Christian’s load of sins, which whether it will not fall off from his
back like Christian’s, into the Slough of Despond, will be seen before
long. The difference between the expense of a war or a peace
establishment is just the difference between a state of productive and
unproductive labour. Now this whole question, which from its complexity
puzzles many people, and has given rise to a great deal of partly wilful
and partly shallow sophistry,[20] may be explained in two words.—Suppose
I give a man five shillings a day for going out in a boat and catching
fish for me. This is paying for productive labour: that is, I give him
so much for what he does, or a claim upon so much of the public stock:
but in taking so much from the stock by laying out his five shillings,
he adds so much to it by his labour, or the disposal of his time in
catching fish. But if I, having the money to do what I please with, give
him five shillings a day for shooting at crows, he is paid equally for
his trouble, and accordingly takes so much from the public stock, while
he adds nothing to it but so much carrion. So if the government pay him
so much a-day for shooting at Frenchmen and Republicans, this is a tax,
a loss, a burthen to the country, without any thing got by it; for we
cannot, after all, eat Frenchmen and Republicans when we have killed
them. War in itself is a thriving, sensible traffic only to cannibals!
Again—if I give a man five shillings for making a pair of shoes, this is
paying for productive labour, viz. for labour that is useful, and that
must be performed by some one; but if I give the same man five shillings
for standing on his head or behind my chair while I am picking my teeth,
or for running up a hill and down again for a wager—this is unproductive
labour, nothing comes of it, and though the man who is thus idly
employed lives by it, others starve, upon whose pittance and whose
labour he lives through me. Such is the nature and effect of war; all
the energies of which tend to waste, and to throw an additional and
heavy burthen upon the country, in proportion to the extent and length
of time that it is carried on. It creates so many useless members of the
community: every man paid by the war out of the taxes paid by the
people, is, in fact, a dead body fastened to a living one, that by its
weight drags it to the earth. A five and twenty years’ war, and nine
hundred millions of debt, are really a couple of millstones round the
neck of a country, that must naturally press her down a little in the
scale of prosperity. That seems to be no riddle. We defy any sophist to
answer this statement of the necessary tendency of war in its general
principle to ruin and impoverish a country. We are not to wonder, when
it does so; but when other causes operate to counteract or retard this
tendency. What is extraordinary in our own case is, that the pernicious
effects of war have been delayed so long, not that they have come upon
us at last.[21]—That money laid out in war is thrown away is
self-evident from this single circumstance, that government never
refund. The reason is, because they never do any thing with their money
that produces money again. They are the worst bankers in the world. The
Exchequer is a true Sinking Fund. If you lend money to a farmer, a
manufacturer, a merchant, he employs it in getting something done, for
which others will pay, because it is useful; as in raising corn, in
weaving cotton, in bringing home sugar or tobacco. But money sunk in a
war brings in no returns—except of killed and wounded. What will any one
give the government for the rotten bones that lie buried at Walcheren,
or the dry ones at Waterloo? Not a six-pence. They cannot make a
collection of wooden legs or dangling sleeves from the hospitals at
Greenwich or Chelsea to set up a raffle or a lottery. They cannot bring
the fruits of the war to auction, or put up the tottering throne of the
Bourbons to the best bidder. They can neither bring back a drop of the
blood that has been shed, nor recover a shilling of the treasure that
has been wasted. If the expenses of the war are not a burden to the
people, which must sink it according to their weight, why do not
government take the whole of this thriving concern into their own hands,
and pay the national debt out of the Droits of Admiralty? In short, the
way to ascertain this point is, by the old method of _reductio ad
absurdum_: Suppose we had to pay the expenses of such another
peace-establishment and such another war. Who does not see that they
would eat up the whole resources of the country, as the present
peace-establishment and actual debt do just one half?
SPEECHES IN PARLIAMENT ON THE DISTRESSES OF THE COUNTRY, _by_ MR.
WESTERN _and_ MR. BROUGHAM.
(CONCLUDED)
‘Come, let us leave off children’s play, and go to push-pin.’
_Polite Conversation._
_Aug. 18, 1816._
The war has wasted the resources of the country in foolery, which the
country has now to pay for in a load of taxes on its remaining
resources, its actual produce and labour. The tax-gatherer is a
government-machine that takes sixty-five millions a-year from the
bankrupt pockets of the nation, to give to those who have brought it
into that situation; who takes so much from the necessaries of life
belonging to the poor, to add to the superfluities of the rich; who adds
so much to the hard labour of the working part of the community, to
‘relieve the killing languor and over-laboured lassitude of those who
have nothing to do’; who, in short, out of the grinding poverty and
ceaseless toil of those who pay the taxes, enables those who receive
them to live in luxury and idleness.
Mr. Burke, whom we have just quoted, has said, that ‘if the poor were to
cut the throats of the rich, they would not have a meal the more for
it.’ First, (for truth is the first thing in our thoughts, and not to
give offence the second) this is a falsehood; a greater one than the
answer of a Bond-street lounger, who coming out of a confectioner’s
shop, where he has had a couple of basons of turtle-soup, an ice, some
jellies, and a quantity of pastry, as he saunters out picking his teeth
and putting the change into his pocket, says to a beggar at the door, ‘I
have nothing for you.’ We confess, we have always felt it an aukward
circumstance to be accosted in this manner, when we have been caught in
the act of indulging a sweet tooth, and it costs us an additional penny.
The rich and poor may at present be compared to the two classes of
frequenters of pastry-cooks’ shops, those on the outside and those on
the in. We would seriously advise the latter, who see the gaunt faces
staring at them through the glass-door, to recollect, that though
custard is nicer than bread, bread is the greatest necessary of the
two.—We had forgot Mr. Burke’s sophism, to which we reply in the second
place, that the cutting of throats is a figure of speech, like the
dagger which he produced in the House of Commons, not necessary to the
speculative decision of the question. The most civil, peaceable, and
complaisant way of putting it is this—whether if the rich were to give
all that they are worth to the poor, the latter would be none the richer
for it? If so, the rich would be none the poorer, and so far could be no
losers on Mr. Burke’s own hypothesis, which supposes, with that
magnanimity of contempt for plain matter of fact which distinguished the
author’s theories, that the rich have nothing, and the poor have every
thing? Had not Mr. Burke a pension of 4000_l._ a-year? Was this nothing?
But even this is not the question neither. It is not, whether if the
rich were to part with all they have to the poor (which is a mere
absurdity) but whether if the rich do not take all they have left from
the poor (which we humbly hope is a proposition that has common sense in
it) the latter may not be the better off with something to live upon
than with nothing? Whether, if the whole load of taxes could be taken
off from them, it would not be a relief to them? Whether, if half the
load of taxes were taken off from them, it would not be a relief to
them? Whether, if any part of the load of taxes that can be taken off
from them were taken off, it would not in the same proportion be a
relief to them? We will venture to say, that no one will deny these
propositions who does not receive so much a year for falsehood and
impudence. The resistance which is made to the general or abstract
principle is not intended to prevent the extreme sweeping application of
that principle to the plundering or (as Mr. Burke will have it) to the
cutting the throats of the rich, but it is a manœuvre, by getting rid of
the general principle altogether, viz. that the extravagance and luxury
of the rich, war, taxes, &c., have a tendency to increase the distresses
of the poor, or measures of retrenchment and reform to lighten those
distresses—to give _carte-blanche_ to the government to squander the
wealth, the blood, the happiness of the nation at pleasure; to grant
jobs, places, pensions, sinecures, reversions without end, to grind
down, to starve and impoverish the country with systematic impunity. It
is a legerdemain trick played off by hireling politicians, to enable
their patrons and employers to pick our pockets and laugh in our faces
at the same time.
It has been said by such persons that taxes are not a burthen to the
country; that the wealth collected in taxes returns through those who
receive to those who pay them, only divided more equally and
beneficially among all parties, just (they say) as the vapours and
moisture of the earth collected in the clouds return to enrich the soil
in soft and fertilizing showers. We shall set ourselves to shew that
this is not true.
Suppose a society of ten persons, without taxes to pay, and who live on
their own labour, on the produce of the ground, and the exchange of one
commodity among themselves for another. Some of these persons will be
naturally employed in tilling the ground, others in tending cattle,
others, in making instruments of husbandry, others in weaving cloth,
others in making shoes, others in building houses, others in making
roads, others in buying and selling, others in fetching and carrying
what the others want. All will be employed in something that they want
themselves, or that others want. In such a state of society, nothing
will be given for nothing. If a man has a bushel of wheat, and only
wants half of it, he will give the other half to some one, for making
him a coat or a pair of shoes. As every one will be paid for what he
does out of the earnings of the labour of others, no one will waste his
time or his strength in doing any thing that is not wanted by some one
else, that is not as useful and necessary, to his subsistence and
comfort, and more so, than the commodity which he gives in exchange for
it. There will be no unproductive labour. What each person gets will be
either in proportion to what he has done for himself, or what he has
added to the comforts of others. Exchange there will be no robbery. The
wealth of all will be the result of the exertions of each individual,
and will circulate equally and beneficially, because those who produce
that wealth will share it among themselves. This is an untaxed state of
society, where wealth changes hands indeed, but finds its level,
notwithstanding.—Now suppose two other individuals to be fastened upon
this society of ten persons—a government-man and a fund-holder. They
change the face of it in an instant. The equilibrium, the balance is
upset. The amount of the wealth of the society before was a thousand
pounds a-year, suppose. The two new-comers take a writ out of their
pockets, by which they quietly lay hands on five hundred of it as their
fair portion. Where are the ten persons now? Mr. Burke, Mr. Coleridge,
Mr. Vansittart, _The Courier_, say—Just where they were before! We say,
No such thing. For three reasons: 1. It cannot be denied that the
interlopers, the government-man and his friend, the fund-holder, who has
lent him money to sport with on all occasions, are substantial _bonâ
fide_ persons, like other men, who live by eating, drinking, &c., and
who, if they only shared equally with the other ten what they had got
amongst them, (for they add nothing to the common stock) must be a
sufficient burthen upon the rest, that is, must diminish the comforts or
increase the labour of each person one-fifth. To hear the other side
talk, one would suppose that those who raise and are paid out of the
taxes never touch a farthing of them, that they have no occasion for
them, that they neither eat nor drink, nor buy clothing, or build houses
with them; that they live upon air, or that harmless food, bank notes (a
thing not to speak of), and that all the money they are so anxious to
collect is distributed by them again for the sole benefit of others, or
passes back through the Exchequer, as if it were a conduit-pipe or empty
tunnel, into the hands of the original proprietors, without diminution
or diversion. Now this is not so. 2. Not only do our government-man and
his friend live like other people upon their means, but they live better
than other people, for they have better means, that is, these two take
half of what the other ten get. They would be fools if they gave it back
to them; no, depend upon it, they lay out their five hundred a-year upon
themselves, for their own sole use, benefit, pleasure, mirth, and
pastime. For each of these gentlemen has just five times as much to
spend as any of those that he lives upon at free cost, and he has
nothing to do but to think how he shall spend it. He eats and drinks as
much as he can, and always of the best and most costly. It is pretended
that the difference in the consumption of the produce of the soil is
little or nothing, for a poor man’s belly will hold as much as a rich
man’s. But not if the one is full and the other empty. The man who lives
upon the taxes, feasts upon venison and turtle, and crams himself to the
throat with fish, flesh, and fowl; the man who pays the taxes, upon a
crust of mouldy bread, and fat rusty bacon: the man who receives the
taxes drinks rich and sparkling wines, hock and canary; the man who pays
them, sour small beer. If the poor man gets drunk and leads an idle
life, his family starve: the rich man drinks his three bottles a day and
does nothing, while his family live on the fat of the land. If the poor
man dies of hard labour and poor living, his family comes to the parish;
if the rich man dies of hard living and want of exercise, he leaves his
family to be provided for by the state. But, 3. All that the
government-man and the fund-holder do not spend upon their bellies, in
revelling and gormandising, they lay out upon their backs, their houses,
their carriages, &c., in inordinate demands upon the labour of the
former ten persons, who are now employed, not in working for one
another, but in pampering the pride, ostentation, vanity, folly, or
vices, of our two gentlemen comers. After glutting their physical
appetites, they take care to apply all the rest to the gratification of
their factitious, arbitrary, and fantastic wants, which are unlimited,
and which the universe could not supply. ‘They toil not, neither do they
spin, and yet even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of
these:’—while the poor are clothed in rags, and the dogs lick up their
sores. The money that is taken from you and me, or the more industrious
members of the community, and that we should have laid out in having
snug, comfortable houses built for us all, or two bed-rooms for our
families instead of one, is employed, now that it has got into the
tax-gatherer’s hands, in hiring the same persons to build two enormous
houses for the government-man and the fund-holder, who live in palaces
while we live in hovels. What are we, the people, the original ten men,
the better for that? The taxes enable those who receive them to pay our
masons, carpenters, &c., for working for them. If we had not been forced
to pay the money in taxes, the same persons would have been employed by
us for our common benefit. Suppose the government-man takes it into his
head to build a colossus, a rotunda, a pyramid, or anything else equally
absurd and gigantic, it would, we say, be a nuisance in proportion to
its size. It would be ten times as great a nuisance if it was ten times
bigger. If it covered a whole county, it would ruin the landed interest.
If it was spread over the whole country, the country must starve. When
the government-man and the fund-holder have got their great houses
built, they must next have them furnished with proportionable
magnificence, and by the same means; with Persian and Turkey carpets,
with Egyptian sofas, down beds, silk curtains, china vases, services of
plate, tables, chairs, stoves, glasses, mirrors, chandeliers, paper
hangings, pictures, busts, ornaments, kickshaws without number, while
you and I live on a mud floor, with bare walls, stuck with a penny
ballad, with a joint-stool to sit upon, a tea-pot without a tea-spout to
drink out of, a truckle-bed or some straw and a blanket to lie upon! Yet
Mr. Burke says, that if we were suddenly converted into state-pensioners
with thirty-thousand a year, we could not furnish our houses a bit the
better for it. This is like Lord Peter, in the Tale of a Tub. Then the
government-man and his friend must have their train of coaches, horses,
dogs, footmen dressed in blue, green, yellow, and red, lazy rascals,
making work for the taylor, the hatter, the shoemaker, the button-maker,
the hair-dresser, the gold and silver laceman, to powder, dress, and
trick them out, that they may lounge behind their mistresses’ coaches,
walk before their sedan chairs, help on their master’s stockings, block
up his doors, and perform a variety of little nameless offices, much to
the ease and satisfaction of the great, but not of the smallest benefit
to any one else. With respect to the article of dogs and horses, a word
in Mr. Malthus’s ear. They come under the head of consumption, and a
swinging item they are. They eat up the food of the children of the
poor. The pleasure and coach-horses kept in this kingdom consume as much
of the produce of the soil as would maintain all the paupers in it. Let
a tax be laid upon them directly, to defray the expense of the
poor-rates, and to suspend the operation of Mr. Malthus’s geometrical
and arithmetical ratios. We see no physical necessity why that ingenious
divine should put a stop to the propagation of the species, that he may
keep two sleek geldings in his stable. We have lately read Swift’s
account of the Houynhyms and Yahoos. There is some truth in it; but
still it has not reconciled us to Mr. Malthus’s proposal of starving the
children of the poor to feed the horses of the rich. But no more of
that! We have said enough at present to shew how the taxes fly away with
the money of a nation; how they go into the hands of the government-man
and the fund-holder, and do not return into the pockets of the people,
who pay them. For the future, Mr. Burke’s assertion, that the taxes are
like the vapours that ascend into the clouds and return to the earth in
fertilizing showers, may pass for an agreeable metaphor, but for nothing
more. A pretty joke truly, this, of the people’s receiving their taxes
back again in payment for what the rich want of them. It is as if I
should buy a pound of beef in a butcher’s shop, and take the money out
of his own till to pay him! It is as if a bill is presented to me for
payment, and I ask the notary for the money to take it up with! It is as
if a Noble Earl was to win 50,000_l._ of a Noble Duke over-night, and
offer to return it to him the next morning, for one of his estates! It
is as if Mr. Burke had been robbed of a bond for 4000_l._ and the
fortunate possessor had offered to restore it, on receiving in lieu his
house and gardens at Beaconsfield! Having thus pointed out the nature of
the distress, we need not inquire far for the remedy.
A LAY-SERMON ON THE DISTRESSES OF THE COUNTRY, _addressed to the Middle
and Higher Orders_. _By_ S. T. Coleridge, _Esq._ Printed for Gale and
Fenner, price 1_s._[22]
——‘Function
Is smother’d in surmise, and nothing is
But what is not.’
‘Or in Franciscan think to pass disguis’d.’
_Sept. 8, 1816._
This Lay-Sermon puts us in mind of Mahomet’s coffin, which was suspended
between heaven and earth, or of the flying island at Laputa, which
hovered over the head of Gulliver. The ingenious author, in a preface,
which is a masterpiece in its kind, having neither beginning, middle,
nor end, apologizes for having published a work, not a line of which is
written, or ever likely to be written. He has, it seems, resorted to
this expedient as the only way of appearing before the public in a
manner worthy of himself and his genius, and descants on the several
advantages to be derived from this original mode of composition;—That as
long as he does not put pen to paper, the first sentence cannot
contradict the second; that neither his reasonings nor his conclusions
can be liable to objection, _in the abstract_; that _omne ignotum pro
magnifico est_, is an axiom laid down by some of the best and wisest men
of antiquity; that hitherto his performance, in the opinion of his
readers, has fallen short of the vastness of his designs, but that no
one can find fault with what he does not write; that while he merely
haunts the public imagination with obscure noises, or by announcing his
spiritual appearance for the next week, and does not venture out _in
propria persona_ with his shroud and surplice on, the Cock-lane Ghost of
mid-day, he may escape in a whole skin without being handled by the mob,
or uncased by the critics; and he considers it the safest way to keep up
the importance of his oracular communications, by letting them remain a
profound secret both to himself and the world.
In this instance, we think the writer’s modesty has led him into a
degree of unnecessary precaution. We see no sort of difference between
his published and his unpublished compositions. It is just as impossible
to get at the meaning of the one as the other. No man ever yet gave Mr.
Coleridge ‘a penny for his thoughts.’ His are all maiden ideas;
immaculate conceptions. He is the ‘Secret Tattle’ of the press. Each
several work exists only in the imagination of the author, and is quite
inaccessible to the understandings of his readers—‘Yet virgin of
Proserpina from Jove.’—We can give just as good a guess at the design of
this Lay-Sermon, which is not published, as of _the Friend_, the
Preliminary Articles in _the Courier_, _the Watchman_, _the Conciones ad
Populum_, or any of the other courtly or popular publications of the
same author. Let the experiment be tried, and if, on committing the
manuscript to the press, the author is caught in the fact of a single
intelligible passage, we will be answerable for Mr. Coleridge’s loss of
character. But we know the force of his genius too well. What is his
_Friend_ itself but an enormous title-page; the longest and most
tiresome prospectus that ever was written; an endless preface to an
imaginary work; a table of contents that fills the whole volume; a huge
bill of fare of all possible subjects, with not an idea to be had for
love or money? One number consists of a grave-faced promise to perform
something impossible in the next; and the next is taken up with a
long-faced apology for not having done it. Through the whole of this
work, Mr. Coleridge appears in the character of the Unborn Doctor; the
very Barmecide of knowledge; the Prince of preparatory authors!
‘He never is—but always to be _wise_.’
He is the Dog in the Manger of literature, an intellectual Mar-Plot, who
will neither let any body else come to a conclusion, nor come to one
himself.[23] This gentleman belongs to the class of eclectic
philosophers; but whereas they professed to examine different systems,
in order to select what was good in each, our perverse critic ransacks
all past or present theories, to pick out their absurdities, and to
abuse whatever is good in them. He takes his notions of religion from
the ‘sublime piety’ of Jordano Bruno, and considers a belief in a God as
a very subordinate question to the worship of the Three Persons of the
Trinity. The thirty-nine articles and St. Athanasius’s creed are, upon
the same principle, much more fundamental parts of the Christian
religion than the miracles or gospel of Christ. He makes the essence of
devotion to consist in Atheism, the perfection of morality in a total
disregard of consequences. He refers the great excellence of the British
Constitution to the prerogative of the Crown, and conceives that the old
French Constitution must have been admirably defended by the
States-General, which never met, from the abuses of arbitrary power. He
highly approves of _ex officio_ informations and special juries, as the
great bulwarks of the liberty of the press; taxes he holds to be a
providential relief to the distresses of the people, and war to be a
state of greater security than peace. He defines Jacobinism to be an
abstract attachment to liberty, truth, and justice; and finding that
this principle has been abused or carried to excess, he argues that
Anti-jacobinism, or the abstract principles of despotism, superstition,
and oppression, are the safe, sure, and undeniable remedy for the
former, and the only means of restoring liberty, truth, and justice in
the world. Again, he places the seat of truth in _the heart_, of virtue
in _the head_; damns a tragedy as shocking that draws tears from the
audience, and pronounces a comedy to be inimitable, if nobody laughs at
it; labours to unsettle the plainest things by far-fetched sophistry,
and makes up for the want of proof in matters of fact by the mechanical
operations of the spirit. He judges of men as he does of things. He
would persuade you that Sir Isaac Newton was a money-scrivener, Voltaire
dull, Bonaparte a poor creature, and the late Mr. Howard a misanthrope;
while he pays a willing homage to the Illustrious Obscure, of whom he
always carries a list in his pocket. His creed is formed not from a
distrust and disavowal of the exploded errors of other systems, but from
a determined rejection of their acknowledged excellences. It is a
transposition of reason and common sense. He adopts all the vulnerable
points of belief as the triumphs of his fastidious philosophy, and holds
a general retainer for the defence of all contradictions in terms and
impossibilities in practice. He is at cross-purposes with himself as
well as others, and discards his own caprices if ever he suspects there
is the least ground for them. Doubt succeeds to doubt, cloud rolls over
cloud, one paradox is driven out by another still greater, in endless
succession. He is equally averse to the prejudices of the vulgar, the
paradoxes of the learned, or the habitual convictions of his own mind.
He moves in an unaccountable diagonal between truth and falsehood, sense
and nonsense, sophistry and common-place, and only assents to any
opinion when he knows that all the reasons are against it. A matter of
fact is abhorrent to his nature: the very _air_ of truth repels him. He
is only saved from the extremities of absurdity by combining them all in
his own person. Two things are indispensable to him—to set out from no
premises, and to arrive at no conclusion. The consciousness of a single
certainty would be an insupportable weight upon his mind. He slides out
of a logical deduction by the help of metaphysics: and if the labyrinths
of metaphysics did not afford him ‘ample scope and verge enough,’ he
would resort to necromancy and the cabbala. He only tolerates the
science of astronomy for the sake of its connection with the dreams of
judicial astrology, and escapes from the _Principia_ of Newton to the
jargon of Lily and Ashmole. All his notions are floating and unfixed,
like what is feigned of the first forms of things flying about in search
of bodies to attach themselves to; but _his_ ideas seek to avoid all
contact with solid substances. Innumerable evanescent thoughts dance
before him, and dazzle his sight, like insects in the evening sun. Truth
is to him a ceaseless round of contradictions: he lives in the belief of
a perpetual lie, and in affecting to think what he pretends to say. His
mind is in a constant estate of flux and reflux: he is like the
Sea-horse in the Ocean; he is the Man in the Moon, the Wandering
Jew.—The reason of all this is, that Mr. Coleridge has great powers of
thought and fancy, without will or sense. He is without a strong feeling
of the existence of any thing out of himself; and he has neither
purposes nor passions of his own to make him wish it to be. All that he
does or thinks is involuntary; even his perversity and self-will are so.
They are nothing but a necessity of yielding to the slightest motive.
Everlasting inconsequentiality marks all that he attempts. All his
impulses are loose, airy, devious, casual. The strongest of his purposes
is lighter than the gossamer, ‘that wantons in the idle summer-air’: the
brightest of his schemes a bubble blown by an infant’s breath, that
rises, glitters, bursts in the same instant:—
‘Or like the Borealis race,
That flit ere you can mark their place:
Or like the snow falls in the river,
A moment white, then gone for ever.’
His mind has infinite activity, which only leads him into numberless
chimeras; and infinite resources, which not being under the guidance of
his will, only distract and perplex him. His genius has angel’s wings;
but neither hands nor feet. He soars up to heaven, circles the empyrean,
or dives to the centre of the earth, but he neither lays his hands upon
the treasures of the one, nor can find a resting place for his feet in
the other. He is no sooner borne to the utmost point of his ambition,
than he is hurried away from it again by the same fantastic impulse, or
his own specific levity. He has all the faculties of the human mind but
one, and yet without that one, the rest only impede and interfere with
each other—‘Like to a man on double business bound who both neglects.’
He would have done better if he had known less. His imagination thus
becomes metaphysical, his metaphysics fantastical, his wit heavy, his
arguments light, his poetry prose, his prose poetry, his politics
turned—but not to account. He belongs to all parties and is of service
to none. He gives up his independence of mind, and yet does not acquire
independence of fortune. He offends others without satisfying himself,
and equally by his servility and singularity, shocks the prejudices of
all about him. If he had had but common moral principle, that is,
sincerity, he would have been a great man; nor hardly, as it is, appears
to us—
‘Less than arch-angel ruined, and the excess
Of glory obscur’d.’
We lose our patience when we think of the powers that he has wasted, and
compare them and their success with those, for instance, of such a
fellow as the ——, all whose ideas, notions, apprehensions,
comprehensions, feelings, virtues, genius, skill, are comprised in the
two words which _Peachum_ describes as necessary qualifications in his
gang, ‘To stand himself and bid others stand!’
When his six Irish friends, the six Irish gentlemen, Mr. Makins, Mr.
Dunkley, Mr. Monaghan, Mr. Gollogher, Mr. Gallaspy, and Mr. O’Keeffe,
after an absence of several years, discovered their old acquaintance
John Buncle, sitting in a mixed company at Harrowgate Wells, they
exclaimed with one accord—‘There he is—making love to the finest woman
in the universe!’ So we may say at a venture of Mr. Coleridge—‘There he
is, at this instant (no matter where) talking away among his gossips, as
if he were at the Court of Semiramis, with the Sophi or Prestor John.’
The place can never reach the height of his argument. He should live in
a world of enchantment, that things might answer to his descriptions.
His talk would suit the miracle of the Conversion of Constantine, or
Raphael’s Assembly of the Just. It is not short of that. His face would
cut no figure there, but his tongue would wag to some purpose. He is fit
to take up the deep pauses of conversation between Cardinals and
Angels—his cue would not be wanting in presence of the beatific vision.
Let him talk on for ever in this world and the next; and both worlds
will be the better for it. But let him not write, or pretend to write,
nonsense. Nobody is the better for it. It was a fine thought in Mr.
Wordsworth to represent Cervantes at the day of judgment and
conflagration of the world carrying off the romance of Don Quixote under
his arm. We hope that Mr. Coleridge, on the same occasion, will leave
‘the Friend’ to take its chance, and his ‘Lay Sermon’ to get up into the
Limbo of Vanity, how it can.
THE STATESMAN’S MANUAL; _or the Bible the best Guide to Political Skill
and Foresight_. _A Lay Sermon, addressed to the Higher Classes of
Society._ _By_ S. T. Coleridge, _Esq._ Gale and Fenner.
_Dec. 29, 1816._
Here is the true Simon Pure. We have by anticipation given some account
of this Sermon. We have only to proceed to specimens in illustration of
what we have said.
It sets out with the following sentence:—
‘If our own knowledge and information concerning the Bible had been
confined to the one fact of its immediate derivation from God, we should
still presume that it contained rules and assistances for all conditions
of men under all circumstances; and therefore for communities no less
than for individuals.’
Now this is well said; ‘and ’tis a kind of good deed to say well.’ But
why did not Mr. Coleridge keep on in the same strain to the end of the
chapter, instead of himself disturbing the harmony and unanimity which
he here very properly supposes to exist on this subject, or questioning
the motives of its existence by such passages as the following, p. 23 of
the Appendix:
‘Thank heaven! notwithstanding the attempts of Mr. Thomas Paine and his
compeers, it is not so bad with us. _Open infidelity_ has ceased to be a
means even of gratifying vanity; for the leaders of the gang themselves
turned apostates to Satan, as soon as the number of their proselytes
became _so large_, that Atheism ceased to give distinction. Nay, it
became a mark of original thinking to defend the Belief and the Ten
Commandments; so the _strong minds_ veered round, and religion came
again into fashion.’
Now we confess we do not find in this statement much to thank heaven
for; if religion has only come into fashion again with the strong
minds—(it will hardly be denied that Mr. Coleridge is one of the
number)—as a better mode of gratifying their vanity than ‘open
infidelity.’ Be this as it may, Mr. Coleridge has here given a true and
masterly delineation of that large class of Proselytes or their
teachers, who believe any thing or nothing, just as their vanity prompts
them. All that we have ever said of modern apostates is poor and feeble
to it. There is however one error in his statement, inasmuch as Mr.
Thomas Paine never openly professed Atheism, whatever some of his
compeers might do.
It is a pity that with all that fund of ‘rules and assistances’ which
the Bible contains for our instruction and reproof, and which the author
in this work proposes to recommend as the Statesman’s Manual, or the
best Guide to Political Skill and Foresight, in times like these, he has
not brought forward a single illustration of his doctrine, nor referred
to a single example in the Jewish history that bears at all, in the
circumstances, or the inference, on our own, but one, and that one he
has purposely omitted. Is this to be credited? Not without quoting the
passage.
‘But do you require some one or more particular passage from the Bible
that may at once illustrate and exemplify its application to the changes
and fortunes of empires? Of the numerous chapters that relate to the
Jewish tribes, their enemies and allies, before and after their division
into two kingdoms, it would be more difficult to state a single one,
from which some guiding light might _not_ be struck.’ [Oh, very well, we
shall have a few of them. The passage goes on.] ‘And in nothing is
Scriptural history more strongly contrasted with the histories of
highest note in the present age, than in its freedom from the hollowness
of abstractions.’ [Mr. Coleridge’s admiration of the inspired writers
seems to be very much mixed with a dislike of Hume and Gibbon.]—‘While
the latter present a shadow-fight of Things and Quantities, the former
gives us the history of Men, and balances the important influence of
individual minds with the previous state of national morals and manners,
in which, as constituting a specific susceptibility, it presents to us
the true cause, both of the influence itself, and of the Weal or Woe
that were its consequents. _How should it be otherwise?_ The histories
and political economy of the present and preceding century partake in
the general contagion of its mechanic philosophy.’ [“still harping on my
daughter”] ‘and are the _product_ of an unenlivened generalizing
understanding. In the Scriptures they are the living _educts_ of the
Imagination; of that reconciling and mediatory power, which
incorporating the reason in Images of the Sense, and organising (as it
were) the flux of the Senses by the permanence and self-circling
energies of the Reason, gives birth to a system of symbols, harmonious
in themselves, and consubstantial with the truths, of which they are the
_conductors_. These are the Wheels which Ezekiel beheld when the hand of
the Lord was upon him, and he saw visions of God as he sat among the
captives by the river of Chebar. _Whither soever the Spirit was to go,
the wheels went, and thither was their spirit to go; for the spirit of
the living creature was in the wheels also._ The truths and the symbols
that represent them move in conjunction, and form the living chariot
that bears up (for us) the throne of the Divine Humanity. _Hence by a
derivative, indeed, but not a divided influence, and though in a
secondary, yet in more than a metaphorical sense, the Sacred Book_ is
worthily entitled the Word of God,’ p. 36.
So that, after all, the Bible is not the immediate word of God, except
according to the German philosophy, and _in something between a literal
and metaphorical sense_. Of all the cants that ever were canted in this
canting world, this is the worst! The author goes on to add, that ‘it is
among the miseries of the present age that it recognises no medium
between _literal_ and _metaphorical_,’ and laments that ‘the mechanical
understanding, in the blindness of its self-complacency, confounds
SYMBOLS with ALLEGORIES.’—This is certainly a sad mistake, which he
labours very learnedly to set right, ‘in a diagonal sidelong movement
between truth and falsehood.’—We assure the reader that the passages
which we have given above are given in the order in which they are
strung together in the Sermon; and so he goes on for several pages,
concluding his career where the Allies have concluded theirs, with the
doctrine of Divine Right; which he does not however establish quite so
successfully with the pen, as they have done with the sword. ‘Herein’
(says this profound writer) ‘the Bible differs from all the books of
Greek philosophy, and in a two-fold manner. It doth not affirm a Divine
Nature only, but a God; and not a God only, but the living God. _Hence
in the Scriptures alone is the_ JUS DIVINUM _or direct Relation of the
State and its Magistracy to the Supreme Being, taught as a vital and
indispensable part of_ ALL MORAL AND ALL POLITICAL WISDOM, _even as the
Jewish alone was a true theocracy!_’
Now it does appear to us, that as the reason why the _Jus Divinum_ was
taught in the Jewish state was, that that alone was a true theocracy,
this is so far from proving this doctrine to be a _part of all moral and
all political wisdom_, that it proves just the contrary. This may
perhaps be owing to our mechanical understanding. Wherever Mr. C. will
shew us the theocracy, we will grant him the _Jus Divinum_. Where God
really pulls down and sets up kings, the people need not do it. Under
the true Jewish theocracy, the priests and prophets cashiered kings; but
our lay-preacher will hardly take this office upon himself as a part of
the _Jus Divinum_, without having any thing better to shew for it than
his profound moral and political wisdom. Mr. Southey hints at something
of the kind in verse, and we are not sure that Mr. Coleridge does not
hint at it in prose. For after his extraordinary career and interminable
circumnavigation through the heaven of heavens, after being wrapt in the
wheels of Ezekiel, and sitting with the captives by the river of Chebar,
he lights once more on English ground, and you think you have him.
‘But I refer to the demand. Were it my object to touch on the present
state of public affairs in this kingdom, or on the prospective measures
in agitation respecting our Sister Island, I would direct your most
serious meditations to the latter period of the reign of Solomon, and
the revolutions in the reign of Rehoboam his son. _But I tread on
glowing embers._ I will turn to a subject on which all men of reflection
are at length in agreement—the causes of the Revolution and fearful
chastisement of France.’—Here Mr. Coleridge is off again on the wings of
fear as he was before on those of fancy.—This trifling can only be
compared to that of the impertinent barber of Bagdad, who being sent for
to shave the prince, spent the whole morning in preparing his razors,
took the height of the sun with an astrolabe, sung the song of Zimri,
and danced the dance of Zamtout, and concluded by declining to perform
the operation at all, because the day was unfavourable to its success.
As we are not so squeamish as Mr. Coleridge, and do not agree with him
and all other men of reflection on the subject of the French Revolution,
we shall turn back to the latter end of the reign of Solomon, and that
of his successor Rehoboam, to find out the parallel to the present reign
and regency which so particularly strikes and startles Mr.
Coleridge.—Here it is for the edification of the curious, from the First
Book of Kings:—
‘And the time that Solomon reigned over all Israel was forty years. And
Solomon slept with his fathers, and was buried in the city of David his
father: and Rehoboam his son reigned in his stead. And Rehoboam went to
Shechem: _for all Israel were come to Shechem to make him king_.[24] And
Jeroboam and all the congregation of Israel came and spake unto
Rehoboam, saying, Thy father (Solomon) made our yoke grievous; now,
therefore, make thou the grievous service of thy father, and his heavy
yoke which he put upon us, lighter, _and we will serve thee_. And he
said unto them, Depart yet for three days, then come again to me. And
the people departed. And King Rehoboam consulted with the old men that
stood before Solomon his father while he yet lived, and said, How do ye
advise, that I may answer this people? And they spake unto him, saying,
_If thou wilt be a servant unto this people_ this day, and wilt serve
them, and answer them, and speak good words unto them, _then_ they will
be thy servants for ever. But he forsook the counsel of the old men,
which they had given him, _and consulted with the young men that were
grown up with him, and which stood before him_: And he said unto them,
What counsel give ye, that we may answer this people, who have spoken to
me, saying, Make the yoke which thy father did put upon us lighter? And
the young men that were grown up with him spake unto him, saying, Thus
shalt thou speak unto this people that spake unto thee, saying, Thy
father made our yoke heavy, but make thou it lighter unto us; thus shalt
thou say unto them, _My little finger shall be thicker than my father’s
loins. And now, whereas my father did lade you with a heavy yoke, I will
add to your yoke: my father hath chastised you with whips: but I will
chastise you with scorpions._ So Jeroboam and all the people came to
Rehoboam the third day, as the king had appointed, saying, come to me
again the third day. And the king _answered the people roughly_, and
forsook the old men’s counsel that they gave him: And spake to them
after the counsel of the young men, saying, _My father made your yoke
heavy, and I will add to your yoke; my father also chastised you with
whips, but I will chastise you with scorpions._ Wherefore the king
hearkened not unto the people; _for the cause was from the Lord_, that
he might perform his saying which the Lord spake by Ahijah, the
Shilonite, unto Jeroboam the son of Nebat.’ [We here see pretty plainly
how the principle of ‘a true theocracy’ qualified the doctrine of _Jus
Divinum_ among the Jews; but let us mark the sequel.] ‘_So when all
Israel saw that the King hearkened not unto them, the people answered
the king, saying, What portion have we in David: neither have we
inheritance in the son of Jesse: to your tents, O Israel: now see to
thine own house, David. So Israel departed unto their tents._ Then king
Rehoboam sent Adoram, who was over the tribute; and all Israel stoned
him with stones that he died; therefore king Rehoboam made speed to get
him up to his chariot to flee to Jerusalem. So Israel rebelled against
the house of David unto this day. And it came to pass when all Israel
heard that Jeroboam was come again, that they sent and called him unto
the congregation, and made him king over all Israel.’
Here is the doctrine and practice of divine right, with a vengeance. We
do not wonder Mr. Coleridge was shy of instances from his Statesman’s
Manual, as the rest are like this. He does not say (neither shall we,
for we are not salamanders any more than he, _to tread on glowing
embers_) whether he approves of the conduct of all Israel in this case,
or of the _grand_, _magnificent_, _and gracious_ answer of the son of
Solomon; but this we will say, that his bringing or alluding to a
passage like this immediately after his _inuendo_ (addressed to the
higher classes) that the doctrine of divine right is contained _par
excellence_ in the Scriptures alone, is we should suppose, an instance
of a power of voluntary self-delusion, and of a delight in exercising it
on the most ticklish topics, greater than ever was or ever will be
possessed by any other individual that ever did or ever will live upon
the face of the earth. ‘Imposture, organised into a comprehensive and
self-consistent whole, forms a world of its own, in which inversion
becomes the order of nature.’ Compared with such powers of inconceivable
mental refinement, hypocrisy is a great baby, a shallow dolt, a gross
dunce, a clumsy devil!
Among other passages, unrivalled in style and matter by any other
author, take the following:—
‘When I named this Essay a Sermon, I sought to prepare the inquirers
after it for the absence of all the usual softenings _suggested by
worldly prudence_, of all compromise between truth and courtesy. But not
even as a Sermon would I have addressed the present Discourse to a
promiscuous audience: and for this reason I likewise announced it in the
title-page, as exclusively _ad clerum_, i.e. (in the old and wide sense
of the word[25]) to men of _clerkly_ acquirements, of whatever
profession.’ [All that we know is, that there is no such title-page to
our copy.] ‘I would that the greater part of our publications could be
thus _directed_, each to its appropriate class of readers. But this
cannot be! For among other odd burs and kecksies, the misgrowth of our
luxuriant activity, we have a READING PUBLIC, as strange _a phrase_,
methinks, as ever forced a splenetic smile on the staid countenance of
meditation; and yet _no fiction_! For our readers have, in good truth,
multiplied exceedingly, and have waxed proud. It would require the
_intrepid accuracy_ of a Colquhoun’—[Intrepid and accurate applied to a
Colquhoun! It seems that whenever an objection in matter of fact occurs
to our author’s mind, he instinctively applies the flattering unction of
words to smooth it over to his conscience, as you apply a salve to a
sore]—‘to venture at the precise number of that vast company only, whose
heads and hearts are dieted at the two public _ordinaries_ of
literature, the circulating libraries and the periodical press. But what
is the result? Does the _inward man_ thrive on this regimen? Alas! if
the average health of the consumers may be judged of by the articles of
largest consumption’—[Is not this a side-blow at the _Times_ and
_Courier_?]—‘if the secretions may be conjectured from the ingredients
of the dishes that are found best suited to their palates; from all that
I have seen, either of the banquet or the guests, I shall utter my
_profaccia_’—[‘Oh thou particular fellow!‘]—‘with a desponding sigh:
From a popular philosophy, and philosophic populace, good sense deliver
us!’
Why so, any more than from a popular religion or a religious populace,
on Mr. Coleridge’s own principle, p. 12, ‘Reason and religion are their
own evidence’? We should suspect that our unread author, the ‘Secret
Tattle’ of the Press, is thus fastidious, because he keeps an ordinary
himself which is not frequented. He professes to be select: but we all
know the secret of ‘seminaries for a limited number of pupils.’ Mr.
Coleridge addresses his Lay-Sermon ‘to the higher classes,’ in his
printed title-page: in that which is not printed he has announced it to
be _directed ad clerum_, which might imply the clergy, but no: he issues
another EXTENT for the benefit of the Reading Public, and says he means
by the annunciation _ad clerum_, all persons of clerkly acquirements,
that is, who can read and write. What wretched stuff is all this! We
well remember a friend of his and ours saying, many years ago, on seeing
a little shabby volume of _Thomson’s Seasons_ lying in the window of a
solitary ale-house, at the top of a rock hanging over the British
Channel,—‘_That is true fame!_’ If he were to write fifty Lay-Sermons,
he could not answer the inference from this one sentence, which is, that
there are books that make their way wherever there are readers, and that
there ought every where to be readers for such books!
To the words READING PUBLIC, in the above passage, is the following
note, which in wit and humour does not fall short of Mr. Southey’s
‘Tract on the Madras System’:—
‘Some participle passive in the diminutive form, _eruditorum natio_ for
instance, might seem at first sight a fuller and more exact designation:
but the superior force and humour of the former become evident whenever
the phrase occurs, as a step or stair in the climax of irony.... Among
the revolutions worthy of notice, the change in the introductory
sentences and prefatory matter in serious books is not the least
striking. The same gross flattery, which disgusts us in the dedications
to individuals, in the elder writers, is now transferred to the nation
at large, or the READING PUBLIC; while the Jeremiads of our old
moralists, and their angry denunciations against the ignorance,
immorality, and irreligion of the _people_ appear (_mutatis mutandis_,
and with an appeal to the worst passions, envy, discontent, scorn,
vindictiveness,[26] &c.) in the shape of bitter libels on ministers,
parliament, the clergy; in short, on the state and church, and all
persons employed in them. Likewise, I would point out to the reader’s
attention the marvellous predominance at present of the words, _Idea_
and Demonstration. Every talker now-a-days has an Idea; aye, and he will
demonstrate it too! A few days ago, I heard one of the READING PUBLIC, a
thinking and independent smuggler, euphonise the latter word with much
significance, in a tirade against the planners of the late African
expedition: “_As to Algiers, any man that has half an_ IDEA _in his
skull must know, that it has been long ago dey-monstered, I should say,
dey-monstrified_,” _&c._ But the phrase, which occasioned this note,
brings to my mind the mistake of a lethargic Dutch traveller, who,
returning highly gratified from a showman’s caravan, which he had been
tempted to enter by the words LEARNED PIG, gilt on the pannels, met
another caravan of a similar shape, with the READING FLY on it, in
letters of the same size and splendour. “Why, dis is voonders above
voonders,” exclaims the Dutchman, takes his seat as first comer, and
soon fatigued by waiting, and by the very hush and intensity of his
expectation, gives way to his constitutional somnolence, from which he
is roused by the supposed showman at Hounslow, with a “_In what name,
Sir, was your place taken? are you booked all the way for Reading?_” Now
a Reading Public is (to my mind) more marvellous still, and in the third
tier of “Voonders above voonders.“‘
A public that could read such stuff as this with any patience would
indeed be so. We do not understand how, with this systematic antipathy
to the Reading Public, it is consistent in Mr. Coleridge to declare of
‘Dr. Bell’s original and unsophisticated plan,’ that he ‘himself regards
it as an especial gift of Providence to the human race, as an
incomparable machine, a vast moral steam-engine.’ Learning is an old
University mistress, that he is not willing to part with, except for the
use of the church of England; and he is sadly afraid she should be
debauched by the ‘liberal ideas’ of Joseph Lancaster! As to his aversion
to the prostitution of the word _Idea_ to common uses and in common
minds, it is no wonder, from the very exalted _idea_ which he has given
us of this term.
‘What other measures I had in contemplation it has been my endeavour to
explain elsewhere.... O what treasures of practical wisdom would be once
more brought into open day by the solution of this problem,’ to wit, ‘a
thorough recasting of the moulds in which the minds of our gentry, the
characters of our future land-owners, magistrates, and senators, are to
receive their shape and fashion. Suffice it for the present to hint the
master-thought. _The first man, on whom the light of an IDEA dawned did
in that same moment receive the spirit and the credentials of a
Lawgiver_; and as long as man shall exist, so long will the possession
of that antecedent knowledge which exists only in the power of an
_idea_, be the one lawful qualification for all dominion in the world of
the senses,’ p. 52. Now we do think this a shorter cut towards the
undermining of the rotten boroughs, and ousting the present ministry,
than any we have yet heard of. One of the most extraordinary ideas in
this work is where the Author proves the doctrine of free will from the
existence of property; and again, when he recommends the study of the
Scriptures, from the example of Heraclitus and Horace. To conclude this
most inconclusive piece of work, we find the distant hopes and doubtful
expectations of the writer’s mind summed up in the following rare
rhapsody. ‘Oh what a mine of undiscovered treasures, what a new world of
power and truth would the Bible promise to our future meditation, if _in
some gracious moment one solitary text of all its inspired contents_
should but dawn upon us in the pure untroubled brightness of an IDEA,
that most glorious birth of the godlike within us, which even as the
light, its material symbol, reflects itself from a thousand surfaces,
and flies homeward to its parent mind, enriched with a thousand forms,
itself above form, and still remaining in its own simplicity and
identity! O for a flash of that same light, in which the first position
of geometric science that ever loosed itself from the generalizations of
a groping and insecure experience, did for the first time reveal itself
to a human intellect in all its evidence and in all its fruitfulness,
Transparence without Vacuum, and Plenitude without Opacity! O! that a
single gleam of our own inward experience would make comprehensible to
us the rapturous EUREKA, and the grateful hecatomb of the philosopher of
Samos: or that vision which, from the contemplation of an arithmetical
harmony, rose to the eye of Kepler, presenting the planetary world, and
all their orbits in the divine order of their ranks and distances; or
which, in the falling of an apple, revealed to the ethereal intuition of
our own Newton the constructive principle of the material universe. The
promises which I have ventured to hold forth concerning the hidden
treasures of the Law and the Prophets will neither be condemned as
paradox, or as exaggeration, by the mind that has learnt to understand
the possibility that the reduction of the sands of the sea to number
should be found a less stupendous problem by Archimedes than the simple
conception of the Parmenidean ONE. What, however, is achievable by the
human understanding without this light may be comprised in the epithet
κενόσπουδοι and _a melancholy comment on that phrase would the history
of the human Cabinets and Legislatures for the last thirty years
furnish_! The excellent Barrow, the last of the disciples of Plato and
Archimedes among our modern mathematicians, shall give the description
and state the value; and, in his words, I shall conclude:—
‘_Aliud agere, to be impertinently busy, doing that which conduceth to
no good purpose, is, in some respect, worse than to do nothing. Of such
industry we may understand that of the Preacher, “The labour of the
foolish wearieth every one of them.”_’
A better conclusion could not be found for this Lay-Sermon: for greater
nonsense the author could not write, even though he were inspired
expressly for the purpose.
MR. COLERIDGE’S LAY-SERMON
TO THE EDITOR OF THE EXAMINER
_Jan. 12, 1817._
Sir,
Your last Sunday’s ‘Literary Notice’ has given me some uneasiness on two
points.
It was in January, 1798, just 19 years ago, that I got up one morning
before day-light to walk 10 miles in the mud, and went to hear a poet
and a philosopher preach. It was the author of the ‘Lay-Sermon.’ Never,
Sir, the longest day I have to live, shall I have such another walk as
this cold, raw, comfortless one in the winter of the year 1798. Mr.
Examiner, _Il y a des impressions que ni le tems ni les circonstances
peuvent effacer. Dusse-je vivre des siècles entiers, le doux tems de ma
jeunesse ne peut renaître pour moi, ni s’effacer jamais dans ma
mémoire._ When I got there, Sir, the organ was playing the 100th psalm,
and when it was done, Mr. C. rose and gave out his text, ‘And he went up
into the mountain to pray, HIMSELF, ALONE. As he gave out this text, his
voice ‘rose like a steam of rich distill’d perfumes,’ and when he came
to the last two words, which he pronounced loud, deep, and distinct, it
seemed to me, Sir, who was then young, as if the sounds had echoed from
the bottom of the human heart, and as if that prayer might have floated
in solemn silence through the universe. The idea of St. John came into
my mind, ‘of one crying in the wilderness, who had his loins girt about,
and whose food was locusts and wild honey.’ The preacher then launched
into his subject, like an eagle dallying with the wind. _That_ sermon,
like _this_ Sermon, was upon peace and war; upon church and state—not
their alliance, but their separation—on the spirit of the world and the
spirit of Christianity, not as the same, but as opposed to one another.
He talked of those who had ‘inscribed the cross of Christ on banners
dripping with human gore.’ He made a poetical and pastoral
excursion,—and to shew the fatal effects of war, drew a striking
contrast between the simple shepherd boy, driving his team afield, or
sitting under the hawthorn, piping to his flock, as though he should
never be old, and the same poor country-lad, crimped, kidnapped, brought
into town, made drunk at an ale-house, turned into a wretched
drummer-boy, with his hair sticking on end with powder and pomatum, a
long cue at his back, and tricked out in the loathsome finery of the
profession of blood.
‘Such were the notes our once-lov’d poet sung.’
And for myself, Sir, I could not have been more delighted if I had heard
the music of the spheres. Poetry and Philosophy had met together, Truth
and Genius had embraced, under the eye and with the sanction of
Religion. This was even beyond my hopes. I returned home well satisfied.
The sun that was still labouring pale and wan through the sky, obscured
by thick mists, seemed an emblem of the _good cause_: and the cold dank
drops of dew that hung half melted on the beard of the thistle, had
something genial and refreshing in them; for there was a spirit of hope
and youth in all nature, that turned everything into good. The face of
nature had not then the brand of JUS DIVINUM on it;
‘Like to that sanguine flower inscrib’d with woe.’
Now, Sir, what I have to complain of is this, that from reading your
account of the ‘Lay-Sermon,’ I begin to suspect that my notions formerly
must have been little better than a deception: that my faith in Mr.
Coleridge’s great powers must have been a vision of my youth, that, like
other such visions, must pass away from me; and that all his genius and
eloquence is _vox et preterea nihil_: for otherwise how is it so lost to
all common sense upon paper?
Again, Sir, I ask Mr. Coleridge, why, having preached such a sermon as I
have described, he has published such a sermon as you have described?
What right, Sir, has he or any man to make a fool of me or any man? I am
naturally, Sir, a man of a plain, dull, dry understanding, without
flights or fancies, and can just contrive to plod on, if left to myself:
what right, then has Mr. C., who is just going to ascend in a balloon,
to offer me a seat in the parachute, only to throw me from the height of
his career upon the ground, and dash me to pieces? Or again, what right
has he to invite me to a feast of poets and philosophers, fruits and
flowers intermixed,—immortal fruits and amaranthine flowers,—and then to
tell me it is all vapour, and, like _Timon_, to throw his empty dishes
in my face? No, Sir, I must and will say it is hard. I hope, between
ourselves, there is no breach of confidence in all this; nor do I well
understand how men’s opinions on moral, political, or religious subjects
can be kept a secret, except by putting them in _The Correspondent_.[27]
SEMPER EGO AUDITOR.
BONAPARTE AND MULLER
THE CELEBRATED HISTORIAN OF SWITZERLAND
[_From Müller’s Posthumous Works._]
‘On the 19th May I was informed by the Minister Secretary of State,
Maret, that at seven o’clock of the evening of the following day I must
wait on the Emperor Napoleon. I waited accordingly on this Minister at
the appointed hour, and was presented. The Emperor sat on a sofa: a few
persons whom I did not know stood at some distance in the apartment. The
Emperor began to speak of the History of Switzerland; told me that I
ought to complete it; that even the more recent times had their
interest. He came to the work of mediation, discovered a very good will,
if we do not meddle with any thing foreign, and remain quietly in the
interior. He proceeded from the Swiss to the old Greek Constitution and
History, to the Theory of Constitutions, to the complete diversity of
those of Asia, (and the causes of this diversity in the climate,
polygamy, &c.) the opposite characters of the Arabian (which the Emperor
highly extolled), and the Tartarian Races (which led to the irruptions
that all civilization had always to dread from that quarter, and the
necessity of a bulwark): the peculiar value of European culture (never
greater freedom, security of property, humanity, and better laws in
general, than since the 15th century); then how every thing was linked
together, and in the inscrutable guidance of an invisible hand; and how
he himself had become great through his enemies: the great confederation
of nations, the idea of which Henry the Fourth never had: the foundation
of all religion and its necessity; that man could not well bear
completely clear truth, and required to be kept in order; the
possibility, however, of a more happy condition, if the numerous feuds
ceased, which were occasioned by too complicated constitutions (such as
the German), and the intolerable burden suffered by States from
excessive armies. A great deal more besides was said, and indeed we
spoke of almost every country and nation. The Emperor spoke at first in
his usual manner; but the more interesting our conversation became, he
spoke in a lower and lower tone, so that I was obliged to bend myself
quite down to his face; and no man can have understood what he said (and
therefore many things I will not repeat).—I opposed him occasionally,
and he entered into discussion. Quite impartially and truly, as before
God, I must say, that the variety of his knowledge, the acuteness of his
observations, the solidity of his understanding (not dazzling wit), his
grand and comprehensive views, filled me with astonishment, and his
manner of speaking to me, with love for him. A couple of Marshals, and
also the Duke of Benevento, had entered in the mean time; he did not
break off. After five quarters, or an hour, and an half, he allowed the
concert to begin; and I know not, whether accidentally or from goodness,
he desired pieces, which, one of them especially, had reference to
pastoral life and the Swiss (_Rans des Vaches_). After this, he bowed in
a friendly manner and left the room.—Since the audience with Frederick
(1782), I never had a conversation on such a variety of subjects, at
least with any Prince: if I can judge correctly from recollection, I
must give the Emperor the preference in point of solidity and
comprehension; Frederick was somewhat Voltairian. Besides, there is in
his tone much firmness and vigour, but in his mouth something as
attractive and fascinating as in Frederick. It was one of the most
remarkable days of my life. By his genius and his disinterested goodness
he has also conquered me.’
ILLUSTRATIONS OF THE TIMES NEWSPAPER
ON MODERN APOSTATES
—— —— ——‘Out of these convertites
There is much matter to be heard and learnt.’—_As you like it._
_Dec. 15, 1816._
This is an age in which, to hear some people talk, you would suppose
there is no such thing as literary prostitution or political apostacy,
in the sense in which those vices used formerly to be practised and
condemned. We live in a liberal age; and a very different and much more
liberal turn has been given to the whole matter. Men do indeed change
sides, but then it is proper at present that they should. They go from
one extreme to another, they proceed to the utmost lengths of violence
and abuse, both against the principles they formerly held and the
persons they formerly agreed with; but then this is entirely owing to
the force of reason and honest conviction. ‘All honourable men’—no
hypocrites amongst them—
‘But all is conscience and tender heart.’
They have deserted the cause of liberty in as far as it deserted them;
but no farther. No sinister motives, no disappointed expectations from a
new order of things, no places to be got under the old, no laureatships,
no editorships, no popular odium to contend with, no court-smiles to
inveigle, have had any weight with them, or can be supposed to have had
any. They could not tolerate wrong on any side, on the side of kings, or
of the people. That’s all. They have changed sides to preserve the
integrity of their principles and the consistency of their characters.
They have gone over to the strong side of the question, merely to shew
the conscious purity of their motives; and they chose the moment of the
total failure of all hopes from the weaker side to desert to the
stronger, to put the matter out of all doubt. They are not only above
corruption, but above suspicion. They have never once been at fault,
have neither sneaked nor shuffled, botched or boggled, in their
politics. They who were loud against the abuses of a principle which
they set out with considering as sacred, the right of a people to chuse
their own form of government, have not turned round to flatter and to
screen, with the closeness of their fulsome embraces, the abuses of a
power which they set out with treating as monstrous, the right of a
discarded family to reign over a nation in perpetuity by the grace of
God. They ‘whose love of liberty was of that dignity that it went hand
in hand even with the vow they made this virgin bride,’ have not stooped
to ‘commit whoredom greedily’ with that old harlot, Despotism. They ‘who
struck the foremost man of all this world but for supporting robbers,’
have not contaminated their fingers with base bribes, nor turned
receivers of stolen goods for paltry knaves and licensed freebooters.
Nice, scrupulous, firm, inflexible, uncorrupted, incapable of injustice
or disguise; patriots in 1793, and royalists in 1816; at all times
extreme and at all times consistent in their opinions; converts to the
cause of kings, only because kings were converts (unaccountable
converts) to the cause of the people: they have not become, nor are they
in danger of becoming, thorough-paced time-servers, regular-bred
courtiers, trammelled tools of despotism, hired pimps and panders of
power. Nothing of the sort. They have not been made (not they) the
overweening dupes of their own conceit and cunning. These political
innocents have not, like the two poor devils in the _Recruiting
Officer_, been laid hold of, entrapped, kidnapped, by that fell
serjeant, Necessity, and then, in the height of their admiration of ‘the
wonderful works of nature’ and the King’s picture, been enlisted for
life in his Majesty’s service, by some Court crimp, some Treasury scout
in the shape of a well-bred baronet or booby Lord. Our maiden poets,
patriots, and philanthropists, have not, it is to be hoped, like _Miss
Lucy Lockitt_, been bilked of their virtue, ‘bamboozled and bit.’ They
have got into a house of ill fame in the neighbourhood of Pall-Mall,
like _Miss Clarissa Harlowe_, but they will defend their honour to the
last gasp with their pens against that old bawd, Legitimacy, as she did
hers with a pen-knife against the old Lady in Duke’s place; or if the
opiates and provocatives unfairly administered, and almost unavoidable
when people get into such company and such situations, should for an
instant rob them of what they hold most dear, their immaculate purity,
they will, like Richardson’s heroine, die a lingering death of grief and
shame for the trick that has been played upon their unsuspecting
credulity!—See, here comes one of them to answer for himself. It is the
same person who in the year 1800 was for making an example of the whole
House of Commons (in spite of the humble petition and remonstrance of
the writer of this article in favour of a small minority), for being the
echoes of the King’s speeches for carrying on the war against the French
Revolution. What is that _thing_ he has in his hand? It is not, nor it
cannot be, a sonnet to the King, celebrating his ‘royal fortitude,’ in
having brought that war to a successful close fourteen years after!
‘Such recantation had no charms for him,
‘Nor could he brook it.’
Nor is it the same consistent person whose deep-toned voice rebellows
among the mountain echoes with peals of ideot rage and demon laughter—
‘Proud Glaramara northward caught the sound,
‘And Kirkstone tossed it from his misty head,
‘That there was strange commotion in the hills,’—
at the infamy and madness of Sir Robert Wilson’s gallant conduct in
having rescued one of its victims from the fangs of that Bourbon
despotism which that royal fortitude had restored.—Is not _that_ Mr.
Southey, with something of the glow on his cheek which he had in writing
_Joan of Arc_, and with the beaked curl of his nose which provoked him
to write the _Inscription on Old Sarum_, returning in disgrace from the
Prince’s Levee, for having indignantly noticed in one of his Birth-day
Odes, Ferdinand’s treatment of the Spanish Patriots?—Just yonder, at the
corner of Paternoster-row, you may see Mr. Coleridge, the author of the
eclogue called FIRE, FAMINE, AND SLAUGHTER, who has been to his
bookseller’s to withdraw his ‘Lay Sermon,’ or Statesman’s Manual in
praise of Fire, Slaughter, and Famine! But who is he ‘whose grief
‘Bears such an emphasis, whose phrase of sorrow
‘Conjures the wandering stars, and makes them stand
‘Like wonder-wounded hearers?’
’Tis the editor of _The Times_, (poor man, his virtuous indignation must
cost him a great deal of pains and trouble!) as hard at it as ever,
about liberty and independence without respect of persons; in a most
_woundy_ passion, we warrant now, at finding legitimacy at some of its
old tricks, caught _flagranti delicto_, so that the poor gentleman could
not hush the matter up, if he would, and would not, if he could, he is a
man of such a nice morality, and such high notions of honour;—thrown
into daily and hourly cold sweats and convulsions at the mention of
daily and hourly acts of tyranny and base submission to it; flying into
the same heats and hysterics as ever, for he has all the reason now,
that he used to say he had; laying it on, thick and threefold, upon the
magnanimous deliverers of Europe; still in the old King Cambyses’ vein,
‘horrors on horror’s head accumulating’; heaping up epithets and
compound epithets of abuse against his new friends, as he used to do
against his old ones, till Mr. Koenig’s new press groans under the
weight of both together; ordering in a new set of types with a new set
of unheard-of nicknames to be applied everlastingly to the present
candidates for newspaper fame, as the worn-out, feeble, and now
insignificant ones of Monster, Tyrant, Fiend, Upstart, Usurper, Rebel,
Regicide, Traitor, Wretch, Villain, Knave, Fool, Madman, Coward,
Impostor, Unnatural Monster, Bloody Tyrant, Hellish Fiend, Corsican
Upstart, Military Usurper, Wicked Rebel, Impious Regicide, Perfidious
Traitor, Vile Wretch, Base Villain, Low-born Knave, Rank Fool, Egregious
Madman, Notorious Coward, Detestable Impostor, were applied to the old;
swearing as he picks his way to court along the streets, (so that the
people ask who the honest, angry gentleman is) that Ferdinand alone has
done more acts of baseness, treachery, cruelty, oppression, infamy, and
ingratitude, in one year, than Napoleon did in his whole reign; teaching
a parrot to call jade and rogue to all legitimate princes and princesses
that deserve it, as he used himself to rail at all the illegitimate
ones, whether they deserved it or not; repeating over and over, till he
is black in the face, Dr. Slop’s curse upon the Allies and their
proceedings; cursing them in Spain, cursing them in Italy, cursing them
in Genoa, cursing them in Saxony, cursing them in Norway, cursing them
in Finland, cursing them in Poland, cursing them in France, cursing them
every where as they deserve, and as the people every where curse them;
sending the Pope and the Inquisition to the Devil; swooning at the
extinction of Spanish liberty under the beloved Ferdinand; going into a
shivering fit at the roasting of Protestants under Louis the Desired;
biting his lips at Lord Castlereagh’s Letter to _Mon Prince_;
horror-struck at the transfer of so many thousand souls, like so many
head of horned cattle, from one legitimate proprietor of the species to
another, after all his vapouring about the liberties of the people and
the independence of states; learned and lofty, sad and solemn, on the
Convention of Paris; looking big at the imposing attitude of Russia, and
going stark staring mad at the application of the torture and the
thumb-screw to the brave Cortes; gnashing his teeth, rolling his eyes,
and dashing his head against the wall, at the total falsification, and
overthrow of every one of his hopes and his prognostics in every corner
of Europe where the Allies have got footing, and there is no corner
which they have not got under their feet, like a toad under a harrow;
and roaring out like Perillus’s bull against the partitions and
repartitions of the coalesced Sovereigns, their invasions, conquests,
seizures, transfers of men and lands; the murders, massacres,
imprisonments, pillagings, frauds, treacheries, breaches of written
treaties and of verbal promises; usurpations, pretensions, and overt
acts of legitimacy, since it was restored to itself, to one and the
self-same tune that he used to lift up his voice, ‘his most sweet
voice,’ against Bonaparte’s wars and conquests, till the Stock Exchange
was stunned with the clamour, and Mr. Walter well-nigh fainted! The only
fault of this account is, that not one word of it is true.
‘Thy stone, oh Sisyphus, stands still:
‘Ixion rests upon his wheel!’
_Once a Jacobin and always a Jacobin_, is a maxim, which,
notwithstanding Mr. Coleridge’s see-saw reasoning to the contrary, we
hold to be true, even of him to this day. _Once an Apostate and always
an Apostate_, we hold to be equally true; and the reason why the last is
true, is that the first is so. A person who is what is called a Jacobin
(and we apply this term in its vulgarest sense to the persons here
meant) that is, who has shaken off certain well known prejudices with
respect to kings or priests, or nobles, cannot so easily resume them
again, whenever his pleasure or his convenience may prompt him to
attempt it. And it is because he cannot resume them again in good
earnest, that he endeavours to make up for his want of sincerity by
violence, either by canting till he makes your soul sicken, like the
author of _The Friend_, or by raving like a Bedlamite, as does the
Editor of _The Times_. Why does he abuse Bonaparte and call him an
upstart? Because he is himself, if he is any thing at all, an upstart;
and because Bonaparte having got the start of him one way, he turned
back to gain the race another, by trying for a court-livery, and to
recommend himself to the house of Brunswick, by proclaiming the
principles of the house of Stuart. Why does he make such a route about
Kings and Queens, and Dukes and Duchesses, and old women of all ages and
both sexes? Because he cares no more for them in his heart than we do.
How should he? ‘What’s Hecuba to him or he to Hecuba?’ What motive has
he, or what ground of passion, that he should
‘Cleave the general ear with horrid speech,
‘And, like a whore, unpack his heart with words!’
None in the world, any more than the poor player in _Hamlet_, who tried
to ‘work his soul to his conceit, tears in his eyes, distraction in his
looks,’ because it was his cue to do so. He blusters and hectors, and
makes a noise to hide his want of consistency, as cowards turn bullies
to hide their want of courage. He is virulent and vulgar in proportion
as he is insincere; and yet it is the only way in which he can seem
himself not to be a hypocrite. He has no blind prejudices to repose on;
no unshaken principles to refer to; no hearty attachment to altars or to
thrones. You see the Jacobinical leaven working in every line that he
writes, and making strange havoc with his present professions. He would
cashier Louis and Ferdinand, Alexander and Frederick, to-morrow, and
hurl them headlong from their thrones with a stroke of his pen, for not
complying with any one of his favourite dogmas. He has no regard for any
thing but his own will; no feeling of any thing but of hatred to the
cause he has deserted, and of the necessity of keeping from his mind, by
every demonstration of outward scorn and horror, whatever might recal
his old, unprofitable, exploded errors. His hatred and dread of the
principles of others, proceeds from his greater hatred and dread of his
own. The spectre of his former opinions glares perpetually near him, and
provokes his frantic zeal. For close behind him stalks the ghost of the
French Revolution, _that unfortunate Miss Bailey_ of modern politicians,
their mistress and their saint, what time
——‘Society became their glittering bride
‘And airy hopes their children,’—
which, if he was once to turn round, would stare him in the face with
self-conviction, and make his pen drop from his hands. It is this morbid
conflict with his own feelings that many persons do not know what to
make of, and which gives such a tragic, and at the same time, ludicrous
air to his writings. He is obliged to wink and shut his apprehension up,
so that he is blind, stupidly blind to all that makes against him, and
all that makes for him. His understanding seems to labour under a
quinsy; and instead of the little _bonnet rouge_ of 1793, wears a huge
pair of Bourbon blinkers for 1816. Hence the endless inconsistencies in
which he involves himself; and as it is his self-will that makes him
insensible to all objections, it is the same headstrong obstinacy which
makes him regardless of contradictions, and proof against conviction.
In a word, to conclude this part of the subject, the writer of _The
Times_ is governed entirely by his will; and this faculty is strong, and
bears sway in him, as all other principles are weak. He asserts a fact
the louder, as he suspects it to be without proof: and defends a measure
the more lustily, as he feels it to be mischievous. He listens only to
his passions and his prejudices, not to truth or reason. Prove to him
that any thing is the most idle fiction that ever was invented, and he
will swear to it: prove to him that it is fraught with destruction to
the liberties of mankind in all places and in all time to come, and he
is your own for ever. _Sed hæc hactenus._ Goethe has given to one of his
heroes this motto—‘Mad but wise.’ We would give the following to the
hero of _The Times_—Mad but not wise.
ILLUSTRATIONS OF ‘THE TIMES’ NEWSPAPER
ON MODERN LAWYERS AND POETS
—— —— ——‘Facilis descensus Averni;
Noctes atque dies patet atri janua Ditis;
Sed revocare gradum superasque evadere ad auras,
Hoc opus, hic labor est.’
_December 22, 1816._
The meaning of which passage is, that it is easier to sail with the
stream, than to strive against it. Our classical reformers should have
known this passage in Virgil. They should have known themselves too; but
they did not. ‘Let no man go about to cozen honesty,’ or to be a knave
by halves. The man, as well as the woman, who deliberates between his
principle and the price of its sacrifice, is lost. The same rule holds
with respect to literary as to any other kind of prostitution. It is the
first false step that always costs the most; and which is, for that
reason, always fatal. It requires an effort of resolution, or at least
obstinate prejudice, for a man to maintain his opinions at the expense
of his interest. But it requires a much greater effort of resolution for
a man to give up his interest to recover his independence; because, with
the consistency of his character, he has lost the habitual energy of his
mind, and the indirect aid of prejudice and obstinacy, which are
sometimes as useful to virtue as they are to vice. A man, in adhering to
his principles in contradiction to the decisions of the world, has many
disadvantages. He has nothing to support him but the supposed sense of
right; and any defect in the justice of his cause, or the force of his
conviction, must prey on his mind, in proportion to the delicacy and
sensitiveness of its texture: he is left alone in his opinions; and,
like _Sam Sharpset_, in Mr. Morton’s new comedy (when he gets into
solitary confinement in the spunging-house,) grows nervous, melancholy,
fantastical, and would be glad of _somebody_ or _anybody_ to sympathize
with him; but when he has once gone over to the strong side of the
question (perhaps from these very scruples of conscience, suggested by
weakness and melancholy, as ‘the Devil is very potent with such spirits,
and abuses them to damn them’) our wavering sceptic no longer finds the
same scruples troublesome; the air of a court promotes their digestion
wonderfully; the load on his conscience falls off at the foot of the
throne. The poet-laureate, standing with his laurel-wreath amidst
‘Britain’s warriors, her statesmen, and her fair,’ thinks no more or
says no more about the patriots of Spain pining in dungeons or consigned
to the torture, though it was his zeal, his virtuous, patriotic,
romantic, disinterested zeal for them, which brought _them_ there, and
him to court. His Prince’s smile soothes the involuntary pang of
sympathy rising in his breast; and Mr. Croker’s whispers drown their
agonizing shrieks. When we are at Rome, we must do as the people at Rome
do. A man in a crowd must go along with the crowd, and cannot stop to
pick his way; nor need he be so particular about it. He has friends to
back him: appearances are for him; the world is on his side; his
interest becomes surety for his honour, his vanity makes him blind to
objections, or overrules them, and he is not so much ashamed of being in
the wrong in such good company. It requires some fortitude to oppose
one’s opinion, however right, to that of all the world besides; none at
all to agree with it, however wrong. Nothing but the strongest and
clearest conviction can support a man in a losing minority: any excuse
or quibble is sufficient to salve his conscience, when he has made sure
of the main chance, and his understanding has become the stalking-horse
of his ambition. It is this single circumstance of not being answerable
for one’s opinions one’s-self, but being able to put them off to other
men’s shoulders in all crowds and collections of men, that is the reason
of the violence of mobs, the venality of courts, and the corruption of
all corporate bodies. It is also the reason of the degeneracy of modern
apostates and reformed Jacobins, who find the applause of their king and
country doubly cheering after being so long without it, and who go all
lengths in adulation and servility, to make up for their former awkward
singularity.
Many of the persons we have known, who have deserted the cause of the
people to take a high tone against those who did not chuse to desert it,
have been lawyers or poets. The last took their leave of it by a poetic
license; the first slunk out of it by some loop-hole of the law. We
shall say a word of each.
‘Our’s is an honest employment,’ says _Peachum_; ‘and so is a lawyer’s.’
It is a lawyer’s business to confound truth and falsehood in the minds
of his hearers; and the natural consequence is, that he confounds them
in his own. He takes his opinion of right and wrong from his brief: his
soul is in his fee. His understanding is _upon the town_, and at the
service of any cause that is paid for before-hand. He is not a hired
suborner of _facts_, but of _reasons_; and though he would not violate
the sacred obligation of an oath, as Lord Ellenborough calls it, by
swearing that black is white, he holds himself at all times in readiness
and bound in duty, to prove it so. He will not swear to an untruth to
get himself hanged, but he will assert it roundly by the hour together
to hang other persons, however innocent,—if he finds it in his retainer.
We do not wish to say any thing illiberal of any profession or set of
men in the abstract. But we think it possible, that they who are
employed to argue away men’s lives at a venture in a court of justice,
may be tempted to write them away deliberately in a newspaper. They who
find it consistent with their honour to do this under the sanction of
the court, may find it to their interest to do the same thing at the
suggestion of a court. A lawyer is a sophist by profession; that is, a
person who barters his opinion, and speaks what he knows to be false in
defence of wrong, and to the prejudice of right. Not only the confirmed
habit of looking at any side of a question with a view to make the worse
appear the better reason, from a motive always foreign to the question
itself, must make truth and falsehood sit loose upon him, and lead him
to ‘look on both indifferently,’ as his convenience prompts; but the
quibbles and quillets of the law give a handle to all that is petty and
perverse in his understanding, and enable him to tamper with his
principles with impunity. Thus the intricacy and verbal distinctions of
the profession promote the practical duplicity of its professors; and
folly and knavery become joint securities for one another. The bent of a
lawyer’s mind is to pervert his talents, if he has any, and to keep down
his feelings, if they are at all in his way. He lives by forging and
uttering counterfeit pretexts; he says not what he believes to be true,
but any thing that by any trick or sleight he can make others believe;
and the more petty, artificial, and far-fetched the contrivance, the
more low, contemptible, and desperate the shift, the more is he admired
and cried up in his profession. A perfect lawyer is one whose
understanding always keeps pace with the inability of words to keep pace
with ideas: who by natural conformation of mind cannot get beyond the
letter to the spirit of any thing; who, by a happy infirmity of soul, is
sure never to lose the form in grasping at the substance. Such a one is
sure to arrive at the head of his profession! Look at the lawyers in the
House of Commons (of course at the head of their profession)—look at
Garrow. We have heard him stringing contradictions there with the
fluency of water, every third sentence giving the lie to the two former;
gabbling folly as if it were the last opportunity he might ever have,
and as regularly put down as he rose up—not for false statements, not
for false reasoning, not for common-place absurdities or vulgar
prejudices, (there is enough of these to be found there without going to
the bar), but for such things as nobody but a lawyer could utter, and as
nobody (not even a lawyer) could believe. The only thing that ever gave
us a good opinion of the House of Commons was to see the contempt with
which they treat lawyers there. The reason is, that no one there but a
lawyer fancies himself holding a brief in his hand as a _carte-blanche_
for vanity and impertinence—no one else thinks he has got an _ad
libitum_ right to express any absurd or nonsensical opinions he pleases,
because he is not supposed to hold the opinions he expresses—no one else
thinks it necessary to confound the distinctions of common-sense to
subject them to those of the law (even Lord Castlereagh would never
think of maintaining it to be lawful to detain a person kidnapped from
France, on the special plea, that the law in that case _not provided_
had _not declared_ it lawful to detain persons so kidnapped, if not
reclaimed by their own country)—no one else thinks of huddling
contradictions into self-evident truths by legal volubility, or of
sharpening nonsense into sense by legal acuteness, or of covering
shallow assumptions under the solemn disguises of the long robe. The
opinions of the gentlemen of the bar go for nothing in the House of
Commons: but their votes tell; and are always sure—in the end! The want
of principle makes up for the want of talent. What a tool in the hands
of a minister is a whole profession, habitually callous to the
distinctions of right and wrong, but perfectly alive to their own
interest, with just ingenuity enough to be able to trump up some fib or
sophistry for or against any measure, and with just understanding enough
to see no more of the real nature or consequences of any measure than
suits their own or their employer’s convenience! What an acquisition to
‘the tried wisdom of parliament’ in the approaching hard season!
But all this, though true, seems to fall short of the subject before us.
The weak side of the professional character is rather an indifference to
truth and justice, than an outrageous and inveterate hatred to them.
They are chargeable, as a general class of men, with levity, servility,
and selfishness; but it seems to be quite out of their character to
commence furious and illiberal fanatics against those who have more
principle than themselves. But not when this character is ingrafted on
that of a true Jacobin renegado. Such a person (and no one else) would
be fit to write the leading article in _The Times_. It is this union of
rare accomplishments (there seems, after all, to be nothing
contradictory in the coalition of the vices) that enables that
nondescript person to blend the violence of the bravo with the subtlety
of a pettifogging attorney—to interlard his furious appeals to the
lowest passions of the middle and upper classes, with nice points of
law, reserved for the opinion of the adepts in the profession—to appeal
to the passions of his city readers when any thing wrong is to be done,
and to their cooler and dispassionate judgments when any thing right is
to be done—that makes him stick (spell-bound) to the letter of the law
when it is in his favour, and set every principle of justice and
humanity at defiance when it interferes with his pragmatical
opinion—that makes him disregard all decency as well as reason out of
‘the lodged hatred’ he bears to the cause he has deserted, and to all
who have not, like himself, deserted it—that made him urge the foul
death of the brave Marshal Ney, by putting a legal interpretation on a
military convention—that tempted him to make out his sanguinary list of
proscribed rebels and regicides (he was not for making out any such list
in the year 1793, nor long after the event he now deplores with such
well-timed indignation)—that makes him desperately bent on hanging
wretches at home in cobweb chains spun from his own brains—that makes
him stake the liberty of nations or the independence of states on a
nickname or a law-quillet, as his irritable humour or professional
habits prevail—that sets him free from all restraints or deference to
others in forming his own opinions, and which would induce him to
subject all the rest of the world to his unprincipled and frantic
dogmas, by entangling them in the quirks and technicalities of the law!
No one else would heroically consign a whole continent to the most
odious and despicable slavery in the world, on the strength of a flaw in
a proclamation: or call that piece of diplomatic atrocity, the
declaration of the 25th of March, a _delicious_ declaration. Such a man
might sell his country, or enslave his species, and justify it to his
conscience and the world by some law-term! Such men are very dangerous,
unless when they are tied up in the forms of a profession, where form is
opposed to form, where no-meaning baffles want of sense, and where no
great harm is done, because there is not much to do: but when chicane
and want of principle are let loose upon the world, ‘with famine, sword,
and fire at their heels, leashed in like hounds,’ when they have their
prey marked out for them by the passions, when they are backed by
force—when the pen of the Editor of _The Times_ is seconded by eleven
hundred thousand bayonets—then such men are very mischievous.
‘My soul, turn from them: turn we to survey’ where poetry, joined hand
in hand with liberty, renews the golden age in 1793, during the reign of
Robespierre, which was hardly thought a blot in their escutcheon, by
those who said and said truly, for what we know, that he destroyed the
lives of hundreds, to save the lives of thousands: (Mark; then, as now,
‘Carnage was the daughter of Humanity.’ It is true, these men have
changed sides, but not parted with their principles, that is, with their
presumption and egotism)—let us turn where Pantisocracy’s equal hills
and vales arise in visionary pomp, where Peace and Truth have kissed
each other ‘in Philarmonia’s undivided dale’; and let us see whether the
fictions and the forms of poetry give any better assurance of political
consistency than the fictions and forms of law.
The spirit of poetry is in itself favourable to humanity and liberty:
but, we suspect, not in times like these—not in the present reign. The
spirit of poetry is not the spirit of mortification or of martyrdom.
Poetry dwells in a perpetual Utopia of its own, and is, for that reason,
very ill calculated to make a Paradise upon earth, by encountering the
shocks and disappointments of the world. Poetry, like the law, is a
fiction; only a more agreeable one. It does not create difficulties
where they do not exist; but contrives to get rid of them, whether they
exist or not. It is not entangled in cobwebs of its own making, but
soars above all obstacles. It cannot be ‘constrained by mastery.’ It has
the range of the universe; it traverses the empyreum, and looks down on
nature from a higher sphere. When it lights upon the earth, it loses
some of its dignity and its use. Its strength is in its wings; its
element the air. Standing on its feet, jostling with the crowd, it is
liable to be overthrown, trampled on, and defaced; for its wings are of
a dazzling brightness, ‘heaven’s own tinct,’ and the least soil upon
them shews to disadvantage. Sunk, degraded as we have seen it, we shall
not insult over it, but leave it to time to take out the stains, seeing
it is a thing immortal as itself. ‘Being so majestical, we should do it
wrong to offer it but the shew of violence.’ But the best things, in
their abuse, often become the worst; and so it is with poetry when it is
diverted from its proper end. Poets live in an ideal world, where they
make every thing out according to their wishes and fancies. They either
find things delightful, or make them so. They feign the beautiful and
grand out of their own minds, and imagine all things to be, not what
they are, but what they ought to be. They are naturally inventors,
creators not of truth but beauty: and while they speak to us from the
sacred shrine of their own hearts, while they pour out the pure
treasures of thought to the world, they cannot be too much admired and
applauded: but when, forgetting their high calling, and becoming tools
and puppets in the hands of others, they would pass off the gewgaws of
corruption and love-tokens of self-interest, as the gifts of the Muse,
they cannot be too much despised and shunned. We do not like novels
founded on facts, nor do we like poets turned courtiers. Poets, it has
been said, succeed best in fiction: and they should for the most part
stick to it. Invention, not upon an imaginary subject, is a lie: the
varnishing over the vices or deformity of actual objects, is hypocrisy.
Players leave their finery at the stage-door, or they would be hooted:
poets come out into the world with all their bravery on, and yet they
would pass for _bonâ fide_ persons. They lend the colours of fancy to
whatever they see: whatever they touch becomes gold, though it were
lead. With them every Joan is a lady: and kings and queens are human.
Matters of fact they embellish at their will, and reason is the
plaything of their passions, their caprice, or interest. There is no
practice so base of which they will not become the panders: no sophistry
of which their understanding may not be made the voluntary dupe. Their
only object is to please their fancy. Their souls are effeminate, half
man and half woman: they want fortitude, and are without principle. If
things do not turn out according to their wishes, they will make their
wishes turn round to things. They can easily overlook whatever they do
not approve, and make an idol of any thing they please. The object of
poetry is to please: this art naturally gives pleasure, and excites
admiration. Poets, therefore, cannot do well without sympathy and
flattery. It is, accordingly, very much against the grain that they
remain long on the unpopular side of the question. They do not like to
be shut out when laurels are to be given away at court—or places under
government to be disposed of, in romantic situations in the country.
They are happy to be reconciled on the first opportunity to prince and
people, and to exchange their principles for a pension. They have not
always strength of mind to think for themselves; nor honesty enough to
bear the unjust stigma of the opinions they have taken upon trust from
others. Truth alone does not satisfy their pampered appetites, without
the sauce of praise. To prefer truth to all other things, it requires
that the mind should have been at some pains in finding it out, and that
it should feel a severe delight in the contemplation of truth, seen by
its own clear light, and not as it is reflected in the admiring eyes of
the world. A philosopher may perhaps make a shift to be contented with
the sober draughts of reason: a poet must have the applause of the world
to intoxicate him. Milton was however a poet, and an honest man; he was
Cromwell’s secretary.
We have here described the spirit of poetry when it comes in contact
with the spirit of the world. Let us see what results from it when it
comes in contact with the spirit of Jacobinism. The spirit of Jacobinism
is essentially at variance with the spirit of poetry: it has ‘no figures
nor no fantasies,’ which the prejudices of superstition or the world
draw in the brains of men: ‘no trivial fond records’: it levels all
distinctions of art and nature: it has no pride, pomp, or circumstance,
belonging to it; it converts the whole principle of admiration in the
poet (which is the essence of poetry) into admiration of himself. The
spirit of Jacobin poetry is rank egotism. We know an instance. It is of
a person who founded a school of poetry on sheer humanity, on ideot boys
and mad mothers, and on Simon Lee, the old huntsman. The secret of the
Jacobin poetry and the anti-jacobin politics of this writer is the same.
His lyrical poetry was a cant of humanity about the commonest people to
level the great with the small; and his political poetry is a cant of
loyalty to level Bonaparte with kings and hereditary imbecility. As he
would put up the commonest of men against kings and nobles, to satisfy
his levelling notions, so for the same reason, he would set up the
meanest of kings against the greatest of men, reposing once more on the
mediocrity of royalty. This person admires nothing that is admirable,
feels no interest in any thing interesting, no grandeur in any thing
grand, no beauty in any thing beautiful. He tolerates nothing but what
he himself creates; he sympathizes only with what can enter into no
competition with him, with ‘the bare earth and mountains bare, and grass
in the green field.’ He sees nothing but himself and the universe. He
hates all greatness, and all pretensions to it but his own. His egotism
is in this respect a madness; for he scorns even the admiration of
himself, thinking it a presumption in any one to suppose that he has
taste or sense enough to understand him. He hates all science and all
art; he hates chemistry, he hates conchology; he hates Sir Isaac Newton;
he hates logic, he hates metaphysics, which he says are unintelligible,
and yet he would be thought to understand them; he hates prose, he hates
all poetry but his own; he hates Shakespeare, or what he calls ‘those
interlocutions between Lucius and Caius,’ because he would have all the
talk to himself, and considers the movements of passion in _Lear_,
_Othello_, or _Macbeth_, as impertinent, compared with the Moods of his
own Mind; he thinks every thing good is contained in the ‘Lyrical
Ballads,’ or, if it is not contained there, it is good for nothing; he
hates music, dancing, and painting; he hates Rubens, he hates Rembrandt,
he hates Raphael, he hates Titian, he hates Vandyke; he hates the
antique; he hates the Apollo Belvidere; he hates the Venus de Medicis.
He hates all that others love and admire but himself. He is glad that
Bonaparte is sent to St. Helena, and that the Louvre is dispersed for
the same reason—to get rid of the idea of any thing greater, or thought
greater than himself. The Bourbons, and their processions of the Holy
Ghost, give no disturbance to his vanity; and he therefore gives them
none.
THE TIMES NEWSPAPER
ON THE CONNEXION BETWEEN TOAD-EATERS AND TYRANTS
‘Doubtless, the pleasure is as great
‘In being cheated as to cheat.’
_Jan. 12, 1817._
We some time ago promised our friend, Mr. Robert Owen, an explanation of
some of the causes which impede the natural progress of liberty and
human happiness. We have in part redeemed this pledge in what we said
about _Coriolanus_, and we shall try in this article to redeem it still
more. We grant to our ingenious and romantic friend, that the progress
of knowledge and civilization is in itself favourable to liberty and
equality, and that the general stream of thought and opinion constantly
sets in this way, till power finds the tide of public feeling becoming
too strong for it, ready to sap its rotten foundations, and ‘bore
through its castle-walls’; and then it contrives to turn the tide of
knowledge and sentiment clean the contrary way, and either bribes human
reason to take part against human nature, or knocks it on the head by a
more summary process. Thus, in the year 1792, Mr. Burke became a
pensioner for writing his book against the French Revolution, and Mr.
Thomas Paine was outlawed for his _Rights of Man_. Since that period,
the press has been the great enemy of freedom, the whole weight of that
immense engine (for the purposes of good or ill) having a fatal bias
given to it by the two main springs of fear and favour.
The weak sides of human intellect, by which power effects its conversion
to the worst purposes, when it finds the exercise of free opinion
inconsistent with the existence and uncontrouled exercise of arbitrary
power, are these four, viz. the grossness of the imagination, which is
seduced by outward appearances from the pursuit of real ultimate good;
the subtlety of the understanding itself, which palliates by flimsy
sophistry the most flagrant abuses; interest and advancement in the
world; and lastly, the feuds and jealousies of literary men among one
another. There is no class of persons so little calculated to act in
_corps_ as literary men. All their views are recluse and separate (for
the mind acts by individual energy, and not by numbers): their motives,
whether good or bad, are personal to themselves, their vanity exclusive,
their love of truth independent; they exist not by the preservation, but
the destruction of their own species; they are governed not by the
spirit of unanimity, but of contradiction. They will hardly allow any
thing to be right or any thing to be wrong, unless they are the first to
find out that it is so; and are ready to prove the best things in the
world the worst, and the worst the best, from the pure impulse of
splenetic overweening self-opinion, much more if they are likely to be
well paid for it—not that interest is their ruling passion, but still it
operates, silent and unseen, with them as with other men, when it can
make a compromise with their vanity. This part of the character of men
of letters is so well known, that Shakespear makes _Brutus_ protest
against the fitness of _Cicero_ to be included in their enterprize on
this very principle:—
‘Oh, name him not: let us not break with him;
For he will never follow any thing,
That other men begin.’
The whole of Mr. Burke’s _Reflections on the French Revolution_[28] is
but an elaborate and damning comment on this short text. He quarrelled
with the French Revolution out of spite to Rousseau, the spark of whose
genius had kindled the flame of liberty in a nation. He therefore
endeavoured to extinguish the flame—to put out the light; and he
succeeded, because there were others like himself, ready to sacrifice
every manly and generous principle to the morbid, sickly, effeminate,
little, selfish, irritable, dirty spirit of authorship. Not only did
such persons, according to Mr. Coleridge’s valuable and competent
testimony (see his _Lay Sermon_) make the distinction between Atheism
and Religion a mere stalking-horse for the indulgence of their idle
vanity, but they made the other questions of Liberty and Slavery, of the
Rights of Man, or the Divine Right of Kings to rule millions of men as
their Slaves for ever, they made these vital and paramount questions
(which whoever wilfully and knowingly compromises, is a traitor to
himself and his species), subordinate to the low, whiffling,
contemptible gratification of their literary jealousy. We shall not go
over the painful list of instances; neither can we forget them. But they
all or almost all contrived to sneak over one by one to the side on
which ‘empty praise or solid pudding’ was to be got; they could not live
without the smiles of the great (not they), nor provide for an
increasing establishment without a loss of character; instead of going
into some profitable business and exchanging their lyres for ledgers,
their pens for the plough (the honest road to riches), they chose rather
to prostitute their pens to the mock-heroic defence of the most
barefaced of all mummeries, the pretended alliance of kings and people!
We told them how it would be, if they succeeded; it has turned out just
as we said; and a pretty figure do these companions of Ulysses
(_Compagnons du Lys_), these gaping converts to despotism, these
well-fed victims of the charms of the Bourbons, now make, nestling under
their laurels in the stye of Corruption, and sunk in torpid repose (from
which they do not like to be disturbed by calling on their former names
or professions), in lazy sinecures and good warm berths! Such is the
history and mystery of literary patriotism and prostitution for the last
twenty years.—Power is subject to none of these disadvantages. It is one
and indivisible; it is self-centered, self-willed, incorrigible,
inaccessible to temptation or entreaty; interest is on its side, passion
is on its side, prejudice is on its side, the name of religion is on its
side; the qualms of conscience it is not subject to, for it is
iron-nerved; humanity it is proof against, for it sets itself up above
humanity; reason it does not hearken to, except that reason which
panders to its will and flatters its pride. It pursues its steady way,
its undeviating everlasting course, ‘unslacked of motion,’ like that
foul Indian idol, the Jaggernaut, and crushes poor upstart poets,
patriots, and philosophers (the beings of an hour) and the successive
never-ending generations of fools and knaves, beneath its feet; and
mankind bow their willing necks to the yoke, and eagerly consign their
children and their children’s children to be torn in pieces by its
scythe, or trampled to death by the gay, gaudy, painted, bloodstained
wheels of the grim idol of power!
Such is the state of the Eastern world, where the inherent baseness of
man’s nature, and his tendency to social order, to tyrannize and to be
tyrannized over, has had full time to develope itself. Our turn seems
next. We are but just setting out, it is true, in this bye-nook and
corner of the world—but just recovering from the effects of the
Revolution of 1688, and the defeated Rebellions of the years 1715 and
1745, but we need hardly despair under the auspices of the Editor of
_The Times_, and with the example of the defeat ‘of the last successful
instance of a democratic rebellion,’ by the second restoration of the
Bourbons, before our eyes and close under our noses. Mr. Owen may think
the example of New Lanark more inviting, but the persons to whom he has
dedicated his work turn their eyes another way![29]
Man is a toad-eating animal. The admiration of power in others is as
common to man as the love of it in himself: the one makes him a tyrant,
the other a slave. It is not he alone, who wears the golden crown, that
is proud of it: the wretch who pines in a dungeon, and in chains, is
dazzled with it; and if he could but shake off his own fetters, would
care little about the wretches whom he left behind him, so that he might
have an opportunity, on being set free himself, of gazing at this
glittering gewgaw ‘on some high holiday of once a year.’ The slave, who
has no other hope or consolation, clings to the apparition of royal
magnificence, which insults his misery and his despair; stares through
the hollow eyes of famine at the insolence of pride and luxury which has
occasioned it, and hugs his chains the closer, because he has nothing
else left. The French, under the old regime, made the glory of their
_Grand Monarque_ a set-off against rags and hunger, equally satisfied
with _shows or bread_; and the poor Spaniard, delivered from temporary
to permanent oppression, looks up once more with pious awe, to the
time-hallowed towers of the Holy Inquisition. As the herd of mankind are
stripped of every thing, in body and mind, so are they thankful for what
is left; as is the desolation of their hearts and the wreck of their
little all, so is the pomp and pride which is built upon their ruin, and
their fawning admiration of it.
‘I’ve heard of hearts unkind, kind deeds
With coldness still returning:
Alas! the gratitude of men
Has oftener set me mourning.’[30]
There is something in the human mind, which requires an object for it to
repose on; and, driven from all other sources of pride or pleasure, it
falls in love with misery, and grows enamoured of oppression. It gazes
after the liberty, the happiness, the comfort, the knowledge, which have
been torn from it by the unfeeling gripe of wealth and power, as the
poor debtor gazes with envy and wonder at the Lord Mayor’s show. Thus is
the world by degrees reduced to a spital or lazar-house, where the
people waste away with want and disease, and are thankful if they are
only suffered to crawl forgotten to their graves. Just in proportion to
the systematic tyranny exercised over a nation, to its loss of a sense
of freedom and the spirit of resistance, will be its loyalty; the most
abject submission will always be rendered to the most confirmed
despotism. The most wretched slaves are the veriest sycophants. The
lacquey, mounted behind his master’s coach, looks down with contempt
upon the mob, forgetting his own origin and his actual situation, and
comparing them only with that standard of gentility which he has
perpetually in his eye. The hireling of the press (a still meaner slave)
wears his livery, and is proud of it. He measures the greatness of
others by his own meanness; their lofty pretensions indemnify him for
his servility; he magnifies the sacredness of their persons to cover the
laxity of his own principles. He offers up his own humanity, and that of
all men, at the shrine of royalty. He sneaks to court; and the bland
accents of power close his ears to the voice of freedom ever after; its
velvet touch makes his heart marble to a people’s sufferings. He is the
intellectual pimp of power, as others are the practical ones of the
pleasures of the great, and often on the same disinterested principle.
For one tyrant, there are a thousand ready slaves. Man is naturally a
worshipper of idols and a lover of kings. It is the excess of individual
power, that strikes and gains over his imagination: the general misery
and degradation which are the necessary consequences of it, are spread
too wide, they lie too deep, their weight and import are too great, to
appeal to any but the slow, inert, speculative, imperfect faculty of
reason. The cause of liberty is lost in its own truth and magnitude;
while the cause of despotism flourishes, triumphs, and is irresistible
in the gross mixture, the _Belle Alliance_, of pride and ignorance.
Power is the grim idol that the world adore; that arms itself with
destruction, and reigns by terror in the coward heart of man; that
dazzles the senses, haunts the imagination, confounds the understanding,
and tames the will, by the vastness of its pretensions, and the very
hopelessness of resistance to them. Nay more, the more mischievous and
extensive the tyranny—the longer it has lasted, and the longer it is
likely to last—the stronger is the hold it takes of the minds of its
victims, the devotion to it increasing with the dread. It does not
satisfy the enormity of the appetite for servility, till it has slain
the mind of a nation, and becomes like the evil principle of the
universe, from which there is no escape. So in some countries, the most
destructive animals are held sacred, despair and terror completely
overpowering reason. The prejudices of superstition (religion is another
name for fear) are always the strongest in favour of those forms of
worship which require the most bloody sacrifices; the foulest idols are
those which are approached with the greatest awe; for it should seem
that those objects are the most sacred to passion and imagination, which
are the most revolting to reason and common sense. No wonder that the
Editor of _The Times_ bows his head before the idol of Divine Right, or
of Legitimacy, (as he calls it) which has had more lives sacrificed to
its ridiculous and unintelligible pretensions, in the last twenty-five
years, than were ever sacrificed to any other idol in all preceding
ages. Never was there any thing so well contrived as this fiction of
Legitimacy, to suit the fastidious delicacy of modern sycophants. It
hits their grovelling servility and petulant egotism exactly between
wind and water. The contrivers or re-modellers of this idol, beat all
other idol-mongers, whether Jews, Gentiles or Christians, hollow. The
principle of an idolatry is the same: it is the want of something to
admire, without knowing what or why: it is the love of an effect without
a cause; it is a voluntary tribute of admiration which does not
compromise our vanity: it is setting something up over all the rest of
the world, to which we feel ourselves to be superior, for it is our own
handy-work; so that the more perverse the homage we pay to it, the more
it pampers our self-will: the meaner the object, the more magnificent
and pompous the attributes we bestow upon it; the greater the lie, the
more enthusiastically it is believed and greedily swallowed:—
‘Of whatsoever race his godhead be,
Stock, stone, or other homely pedigree,
In his defence his servants are as bold
As if he had been made of beaten gold.’
In this inverted ratio, the bungling impostors of former times, and less
refined countries, got no further than stocks and stones: their utmost
stretch of refinement in absurdity went no further than to select the
most mischievous animals or the most worthless objects for the adoration
of their besotted votaries: but the framers of the new law-fiction of
legitimacy have started a non-entity. The ancients sometimes worshipped
the sun or stars, or deified heroes and great men: the moderns have
found out the image of the divinity in Louis XVIII.! They have set up an
object for their idolatry, which they themselves must laugh at, if
hypocrisy were not with them the most serious thing in the world. They
offer up thirty millions of men to it as its victims, and yet they know
that it is nothing but a scare-crow to keep the world in subjection to
their renegado whimsies and preposterous hatred of the liberty and
happiness of mankind. They do not think kings gods, but they make
believe that they do so, to degrade their fellows to the rank of brutes.
Legitimacy answers every object of their meanness and malice—_omne tulit
punctum_.—This mock-doctrine, this little Hunchback, which our
resurrection-men, the Humane Society of Divine Right, have foisted on
the altar of Liberty, is not only a phantom of the imagination, but a
contradiction in terms; it is a prejudice, but an exploded prejudice; it
is an imposture, that imposes on nobody; it is powerful only in
impotence, safe in absurdity, courted from fear and hatred, a dead
prejudice linked to the living mind; the sink of honour, the grave of
liberty, a palsy in the heart of a nation; it claims the species as its
property, and derives its right neither from God nor man; not from the
authority of the Church, which it treats cavalierly, and yet in contempt
of the will of the people, which it scouts as opposed to its own: its
two chief supporters are, the sword of the Duke of Wellington and the
pen of the Editor of _The Times_! The last of these props has, we
understand, just failed it.
We formerly gave the Editor of _The Times_ a definition of a true
Jacobin, as one ‘who had seen the evening star set over a poor man’s
cottage, and connected it with the hope of human happiness.’ The
city-politician laughed this pastoral definition to scorn, and nicknamed
the person who had very innocently laid it down, ‘the true Jacobin who
writes in the Chronicle,’—a nickname by which we profited as little as
he has by our Illustrations. Since that time our imagination has grown a
little less romantic: so we will give him another, which he may chew the
cud upon at his leisure. A true Jacobin, then, is one who does not
believe in the divine right of kings, or in any other _alias_ for it,
which implies that they reign ‘in contempt of the will of the people’;
and he holds all such kings to be tyrants, and their subjects slaves. To
be a true Jacobin, a man must be a good hater; but this is the most
difficult and the least amiable of all the virtues: the most trying and
the most thankless of all tasks. The love of liberty consists in the
hatred of tyrants. The true Jacobin hates the enemies of liberty as they
hate liberty, with all his strength and with all his might, and with all
his heart and with all his soul. His memory is as long, and his will as
strong as theirs, though his hands are shorter. He never forgets or
forgives an injury done to the people, for tyrants never forget or
forgive one done to themselves. There is no love lost between them. He
does not leave them the sole benefit of their old motto, _Odia in longum
jaciens quæ conderet auctaque promeret_. He makes neither peace nor
truce with them. His hatred of wrong only ceases with the wrong. The
sense of it, and of the barefaced assumption of the right to inflict it,
deprives him of his rest. It stagnates in his blood. It loads his heart
with aspics’ tongues, deadly to venal pens. It settles in his brain—it
puts him beside himself. Who will not feel all this for a girl, a toy, a
turn of the dice, a word, a blow, for any thing relating to himself; and
will not the friend of liberty feel as much for mankind? The love of
truth is a passion in his mind, as the love of power is a passion in the
minds of others. Abstract reason, unassisted by passion, is no match for
power and prejudice, armed with force and cunning. The love of liberty
is the love of others; the love of power is the love of ourselves. The
one is real; the other often but an empty dream. Hence the defection of
modern apostates. While they are looking about, wavering and distracted,
in pursuit of universal good or universal fame, the eye of power is upon
them, like the eye of Providence, that neither slumbers nor sleeps, and
that watches but for one object, its own good. They take no notice of it
at first, but it is still upon them, and never off them. It at length
catches theirs, and they bow to its sacred light; and like the poor
fluttering bird, quail beneath it, are seized with a vertigo, and drop
senseless into its jaws, that close upon them for ever, and so we see no
more of them, which is well.
‘And we saw three poets in a dream, walking up and down on the face of
the earth, and holding in their hands a human heart, which, as they
raised their eyes to heaven, they kissed and worshipped; and a mighty
shout arose and shook the air, for the towers of the Bastile had fallen,
and a nation had become, of slaves, freemen; and the three poets, as
they heard the sound, leaped and shouted, and made merry, and their
voice was choked with tears of joy, which they shed over the human
heart, which they kissed and worshipped. And not long after, we saw the
same three poets, the one with a receipt-stamp in his hand, the other
with a laurel on his head, and the third with a symbol which we could
make nothing of, for it was neither literal nor allegorical, following
in the train of the Pope and the Inquisition and the Bourbons, and
worshipping the mark of the Beast, with the emblem of the human heart
thrown beneath their feet, which they trampled and spit upon!’—This
apologue is not worth finishing, nor are the people to whom it relates
worth talking of. We have done with them.
INTERESTING FACTS _relating to the Fall and Death of Joachim Murat, King
of Naples; the Capitulation of Paris in 1815; and the Second Restoration
of the Bourbons: Original Letters from King Joachim to the Author, with
some Account of the Author, and of his Persecution by the French
Government_. _By_ Francis Macirone, _late Aid-de-camp to King Joachim;
Knight of the Order of the Two Sicilies_, &c. &c. London: Ridgways,
1817.
‘Come, draw the curtain; shew the picture.’
_February 2, 1817._
We have here a pretty peep behind ‘the dark blanket’ of Legitimacy. We
thank Mr. Macirone for having introduced us once more to the old lady of
that name in her dressing-room. What a tissue of patches and of paint!
What a quantity of wrinkles and of proud flesh! What a collection of
sickly perfumes and slow poisons, with her love-powders and the
assassin’s knife placed side by side! What treacheries and lies upon her
tongue! What meanness and malice in her heart! What an old hypocritical
hag it is! What a vile canting, mumbling, mischievous witch! ‘Pah! and
smells so.’ The very wind that kisses all it meets, stops the nose at
her. We wonder how any prince should take a fancy to such an old rotten
demirep! Yet this is the heroine of all heroines (Mr. Southey will tell
you in hobbling illegitimate verse), a greater heroine than even _his_
Joan of Arc—the heroine of Leipsic, of Saragossa, and of Waterloo! It is
indeed the same. Look at her again, look at her well, look at her
closely, and you will find that it is ‘that harlot old,’
‘The same that was, that is, and is to be;’—
the mother of abominations, the daughter of lies. Dig up the bones of a
few of her wretched favourites you may, in Carmelite dresses or any
other trumpery; but can you dig up the bones of the men that she has
murdered, from the earliest time? can you collect the blood of the
millions of men that she has sacrificed in the last twenty-five years
alone, and pour it into the Thames, while our merchant-men ride
freighted with gold upon the gory stream, and the Editor of _The Times_
(without being called to account for it) applauds with the ‘sweet
thunder’ of his pen the proud balance of our exports and our imports,
blood and gold? or can you collect the sighs and dried-up tears of
wretches that she, Legitimacy, has doomed to pine without a cause in
dungeons, to prove that she is the dread sovereign of the human heart?
or the groans and shrieks of victims stretched on the rack, or consumed
by slow fire, to prove that the minds of men belong to her? or the cries
of hunger and pinching cold, the sweat, the rags, the diseases, the
emaciated wan looks, by which she proves that the bodies of men are
her’s? or can you conjure up the wide spreading desolation which she
breathes from her nostrils, the famine and pestilence which she scatters
before her for her sport and wantonness, the ruins of cities and of
countries which she makes her throne, and from which, amidst the groans
of the dying and the dead, she utters, laughing, the sacred doctrine of
‘millions made for one!’—One thing contents us, and sits light upon our
hearts, that we have always seen through her disguises: we have known
her from first to last, though ‘she has changed shapes with Proteus,’
and now gone by the name of Religion, now of Social Order, now of
Morality, now been personified at Guildhall as Trade and Commerce, or
sat in the Speaker’s chair as the English Constitution (the most
impudent trick of all)—under none of these respectable alias’s and
swindling characters, nor when she towered above the conflagration of
Moscow, _dressed in a robe of flame-coloured taffeta_, or sat perched as
Victory on the crests of British soldiers, nor when she hovered over the
frightened country as the harpy of Invasion; no, nor at any other time
did we ever take her for any thing but what we knew she was, the
patron-saint of tyrants and of slaves; an adulteress, an impostor, and a
murderess. The world, whom she has juggled, begin to find her out too:
it will hardly ‘stand now with her sorceries and her lies, and the blood
of men, with which she has made herself drunk’; and we may yet live to
see her carted for a bawd.
Having thus vented the overflowings of our gall against the old lady
above-mentioned, we shall proceed to a detail of some of her fraudulent
transactions, as they are stated with great clearness and command of
temper, in Mr. Macirone’s ‘Interesting Facts.’ Interesting indeed! But
no more comments for the present. We have not time to grace our
narrative or confirm our doctrine of ‘the uses of _legitimacy_,’ by
giving Mr. Macirone’s history of the treatment of his family by the Holy
See, which brought his father to this country, and eventually led to his
connexion with Murat. It appears that his grandfather, the head of a
noble and wealthy family at Rome, was ruined in a large concern, and
then robbed of his right by Monsignore Banchieri, treasurer to the Pope,
a ‘gentleman and man of honour’ in those times; and that, though the
tribunals awarded him reparation, the decisions in his favour were
constantly defeated by the interposition of the papal power. The
consequence was, that the elder Macirone, after a fruitless struggle of
several years with legitimate power and injustice, died of grief and
chagrin, and his family were dispersed in various directions: his eldest
son came to England and married an English lady, of which union our
author was the issue. This short episode shews what Legitimacy, that is,
_a power above the law, and accountable only to heaven for its exercise,
its use or its abuse_, always was, and always will be. These tricks were
played long before the French revolution, and with a million other
tricks of the same legitimate, that is, lawless kind, produced it.—We
have here an account of some of the tricks resorted to by the wielders
and abettors of mild paternal sway to restore the old right to do wrong
with impunity, and to put down the principles and partizans of the
revolution, as an example of successful rebellion against power held in
contempt of the people, and exercised in disregard of law. Mr. Macirone,
a native of England, went to Italy at the age of fifteen, and remained
there from 1803 till 1812. Part of this time he was detained as an
English prisoner. He was afterwards employed as an _aid-de-camp_ to
Murat, and gives the following narrative of his transactions with the
Allies:—
1. A Treaty of Alliance, offensive and defensive, was signed between
Austria and Naples, on the 11th of Jan. 1814, and the Austrian
Plenipotentiary declared that England was ready to accede to a similar
Treaty with King Joachim.—2. A Convention was signed by Lord William
Bentinck with the Neapolitan Government, which opened the ports of Italy
to the British fleet, and placed affairs on a footing of perfect
peace.—3. Murat, on the strength of these engagements, opened the
campaign in concert with the Allies, when instantly objections were made
to the ratification of the Treaty with Austria, not by Austria, but by
England, on some pretence of the territorial indemnifications to be
granted to Murat at the expense of the Pope.—4. Murat assented to the
proposed modifications, and Lord W. Bentinck declared, that the English
Government now agreed entirely to the Treaty between Austria and
Naples.—5. This declaration of Lord W. Bentinck was confirmed by a
declaration of Lord Castlereagh, that it was only from motives of
delicacy to the King of Sicily that the English Government delayed the
conclusion of a special and separate Treaty with Naples, _that a Treaty
of Indemnities to the King of Sicily and of Peace with King Joachim
might go hand in hand_.—6. Murat now joined the campaign of 1814, and
turned the scale against France and Napoleon.—In this state of things,
Mr. Macirone observes,—
‘A variety of circumstances had now combined to induce the King to doubt
the sincerity of the Allies. _The Emperor of Austria had delayed for
many days the transmission of the ratification of the Treaty of the 11th
January. Ferdinand of Sicily had published an order of the day to some
Sicilian troops about to land at Leghorn, in which they were informed
that they were going to recover his kingdom of Naples, which he had
never ceded, and never would cede. The English general, Lord William
Bentinck, had landed with these troops, under instructions to excite a
revolution in Italy, and had insisted on the maintenance of a position
(Tuscany) which intercepted the communication between the Neapolitan
army and Naples; propositions at the same time were made in a foreign
camp to Neapolitan generals and other officers, for the expulsion of the
then reigning dynasty from the throne of Naples._ The doubts which these
circumstances had excited were removed by a declaration of General Sir
Robert Wilson, at Bologna; _that he considered the letter of Lord
Castlereagh, containing the promise of a formal treaty, as of equal
value and force with a treaty already signed. And that neither the
executive authority, nor the parliament, would hesitate to recognize the
validity of such an engagement_. Indeed, it was in his opinion more
imperative, if possible, than a regular treaty, _because it connected an
appeal to honour with an obligation on good faith_. From that moment the
King again made the most zealous efforts in the common cause.’—p. 20.
Alas! Sir Robert, ‘How little knew’st thou of Calista!’ as a body may
say. But you have in part redeemed your errors, and revenged the trick
that was thus put upon your _preux chevalier_ notions of honour!—One
would think there was shuffling and paltering and evasion and cant and
cunning enough in the foregoing part of this transaction. What follows
is worse. After the campaigns which so providentially delivered France
and Europe from the hands of illegitimate into those of legitimate power
_en plein droit_, and while the immortal congress was yet assembled at
Vienna, ‘Prince Talleyrand, on the part of King Louis,’ says Mr.
Macirone, ‘was indefatigable in his exertions to induce the Austrian
government to withdraw their alliance from the King of Naples, from whom
the allied powers had so recently received the most efficient support.
The Austrian government being warmly urged to undertake the _holy war_
of legitimacy against its ally, the King of Naples, at length expressed
its willingness to comply, but alleged the exhausted state of the
finances of the country. _This difficulty was, it is said, immediately
removed by the British ministers, who offered to defray all the expense
of the expedition_, and moreover to furnish a British fleet, in
preference to a French fleet, as proposed by Talleyrand in his famous
note, which fleet should act in concert with and assist the movements of
the Austrian forces.’
One would think that after this open and profligate breach of faith, the
legitimates had made up their minds to keep no terms with illegitimacy.
But, no: expediency turns round once more, and British honour,
simplicity, and good faith, with it! Murat, in consequence of the
preparations against him, attacked the Austrians ‘at the very moment, as
it afterwards turned out, that the apprehensions of his union with
Napoleon, who had just returned to France from Elba, had determined the
British Cabinet to attend to the invocations of justice in his favour.
Lord Castlereagh had written to the Duke of Wellington, who was at that
time the plenipotentiary of the British court at Vienna, and informed
him, that _in consequence of the reappearance of Napoleon at the head of
the French nation_, the British ministers thought it adviseable to unite
all the force they could collect, and had consequently come to a
determination immediately to conclude a treaty of alliance with the King
of Naples.’
Bravo, my Lord Castlereagh! you may one day find, after all, that
honesty is the best policy; and we hope the Editor of _The Times_, in
the next number of _The Correspondent_, will relieve his praises of the
allies and his compliments to the Duke of Levis, by a criticism to prove
that Jonathan Wild and Count Fathom were ‘gentlemen and men of honour!’
But the tale of blushing British honour is not ended. At the time when
Murat was at the height of his success against the Austrians, ‘Colonel
Dalrymple arrived at Bologna, King Joachim’s head-quarters, commissioned
by Lord William Bentinck, _to request that the territory of his
Britannic majesty’s ally, the King of Sardinia, might not be violated by
the Neapolitan army_.’—In consequence of Murat’s polite attention to
this delicate request, he lost his campaign, his crown, and his life;
for no sooner was he defeated in his attempts to force the passage of
the Po, which he might easily have effected, by infringing upon a small
corner of the Piedmontese territory, than ‘he was surprized at receiving
a notification from Lord William Bentinck, _that his instructions were
to join the Austrians against him_.’—We know the consequences of this
exquisite simplicity of proceeding on both sides. Poor Murat! he well
deserved his fate, but not at the hands from which he received it.
Foolish fellow! He did not know that legitimacy keeps no faith with
illegitimacy. At present, we suppose that point is pretty well settled.
Murat was senseless enough to believe that he, who had been made a king
by Bonaparte, would be cordially received in the list of kings by those
who were so _by divine right_; and he was base enough to turn against
his benefactor, his country, and the human race; but in himself he
appears to have been a gallant, generous, and heroic-minded man. The
account of his escape from the Austrians, and of his landing in France,
is interesting:—
‘On the king’s approach to Naples with a small remnant of his army, six
thousand of the national guard, with General Macdonald, minister of war,
at their head, marched forth to meet him. They greeted his return in the
most loyal and affectionate manner, exhorting him still to hope for
success in the love and devotedness of his subjects, swearing that they
were all ready to perish in defence of their king and country; but in
consequence of the part England had taken against him, he declined
making any further efforts, which would only tend to involve the brave
and loyal in his own catastrophe.
‘He entered Naples unknown, in the evening of the 19th May, accompanied
by his nephew, who was colonel of the 9th regiment of lancers, and four
privates. He immediately proceeded to his palace, where he appeared
before the queen, pale and emaciated, in the habit of a lancer; tenderly
embracing her, he said, “All is lost, madam, but my life; that I have
not been able to lose.”[31]
‘Having taken farewell of his children, he caused his hair, which he had
hitherto worn in long ringlets, to be cut short, and habited in a plain
grey suit, accompanied by his nephew, the colonel, he proceeded on foot
to the sea-shore, opposite to the island of Nisida. He there embarked in
a little boat, and proceeded to the neighbouring island of Ischia. There
he remained three days without being known, and on the fourth, as he was
walking on the sea-shore on the southern side of the island, in company
with the colonel, consulting about the means of effecting their escape
to France, they discovered a small vessel to the east, in full sail,
approaching the spot where they were standing.
‘The king immediately hailed the vessel, and getting into a fishing-boat
which was on the shore, ordered the crew to row towards it, and, as soon
as they were perceived, a boat was sent from the vessel to meet them.
The feelings of all parties may easily be imagined, when, in one of the
persons on board, the king recognized his attached and faithful servant
the Duke of Roccaromana, to whom the vessel belonged, and who, in
company with the Marquis Giuliano, the king’s aid-de-camp, had escaped
from Naples, and was proceeding in this vessel in search of the king,
under the greatest anxiety and apprehension, lest some accident might
have befallen him, although, previously to quitting the palace, the king
had divided with the duke and marquis a considerable sum in gold, and
acquainted them with his plan of going to Ischia, accompanied only by
his nephew, and of embarking from thence to France.
‘The duke could not succeed in effecting his escape from Naples until
three days after the departure of the king. The enemy’s flag had been
hoisted in Ischia; and it appeared highly improbable, under all
circumstances, that the king could have remained there concealed for
those three days. It was unsafe for the duke to attempt landing on the
island, and yet there appeared no other means of ascertaining whether
the king was there or had proceeded on his voyage. In this
embarrassment, it happened that the duke, who was most anxiously
examining the shore of the island with a glass, perceived and recognized
the king. The rest of their voyage proved most prosperous and
expeditious. They landed at Cannes the 27th or 28th of May.’—p. 30.
We shall in our next give the particulars of Mr. Macirone’s interviews
with the Duke of Wellington, relating to the convention of Paris; and we
shall be cautious what we say of his Grace’s observations and conduct on
that occasion; for if we were to say what we think of that noble person,
there might be some offence in it. But we cannot help having an opinion
of him, which all that we hear of him confirms.
INTERESTING FACTS _relating to the Fall of Murat, &c._
_By_ F. Macirone, _&c._
(CONCLUDED.)
Sta viator, heroem calcas.
_Feb. 9, 1817._
We proceed to Mr. Macirone’s account of the surrender of Paris. Let it
speak for itself:—
‘Immediately after the battle of Waterloo, Napoleon returned to Paris,
and abdicated the throne in _favour of his son, who would have been
accepted and proclaimed by the French people_, but for the opposition of
two celebrated individuals.
‘On this abdication, a commission of government, as it was called, was
formed, consisting of Fouché, the president, Caulincourt, Carnot,
Quinette, and Grenier.
‘On the 26th of June, I believe, the Duke of Wellington, at the head of
his victorious army, reached Compeigne. In the course of the following
night, a deputation of five persons was sent to him from Paris by the
two Chambers, to solicit an armistice for a few days. The avowed purpose
of this mission was to afford time for the return of another deputation,
which had been despatched to the Allied Sovereigns, to assert the right
of the French people to choose their own government, in conformity to
the Declaration of the Allies, _that they warred against the person of
Napoleon only, and not against the French people, or to force upon them
any particular government_.
‘The Chamber of Deputies, the majority of the Commissioners of
Government, and the Army, now in great strength in Paris, were
_determined to resist any attempt to force the Bourbons upon them_;
while the avowed opinion of Fouché and Caulincourt was, that such a
determination could only lead to the destruction of Paris, and the loss
of thousands of lives. They therefore sought the means of opening a
communication with the Duke of Wellington, in which they might impart to
him their views, and avert the calamity which they apprehended from the
projects of the other parties. In the expediency of procuring an
armistice for a few days, _all_ parties concurred; and Fouché, who had
become acquainted with me in my interviews with him respecting King
Joachim, solicited me to undertake the task of carrying on a
communication between him and the Duke of Wellington. It was sufficient
for me to know that the service in which I was to be engaged had for its
object the prevention of a sanguinary conflict, which an attempt to take
Paris by force would have occasioned, and I therefore consented to be
the bearer of Fouché’s message to the Duke.
‘My feelings as an Englishman entirely influenced my conduct in this
instance. I exulted in the success of our army, and in the military
glory which the English name had acquired; and it appeared to me, that
whatever might tend to prevent the further effusion of blood, must be
highly acceptable to my country; and to be selected as an instrument, by
which so humane and desirable an object might be accomplished, was
highly gratifying to my mind, and I should not have thought myself at
liberty to refuse to engage in it, from any opinion I might entertain of
the private views of the persons by whom I should be employed. Impressed
with these sentiments, I left Paris at midnight. I proceeded to the
Barriere de la Villette, where I found some difficulty in getting my
carriage over the different entrenchments and _abattis_, but still more
from the French officers, who evinced the greatest reluctance in
permitting me to pass, observing that I was probably a person sent out
to treat with the enemy, and to betray them; but on my assuring them
that the purport of my mission was entirely analogous to their views and
interests, I was suffered to proceed without a trumpet. Before I had got
beyond the French lines, I was again stopped by a picquet of
cuirassiers, who refused to let me pass without an order from the
officer commanding the inner posts; and while I was asserting my right
to proceed, a cuirassier fortunately happened to hold a light to my
face, and very respectfully accosted me with the salutation of “bon
voyage Major”: his comrades immediately asked him who I was? he
answered, “it’s the Major of the 9th Hussars,” for whom I suppose he had
mistaken me. This was instantly believed; and, greeted by the
salutations and good wishes of the whole troop, I was allowed to
continue my journey.
‘The Prussian advanced posts were at less than two miles distant, and I
was consequently very soon stopped by a Prussian lancer, who, upon my
telling him that I was an English officer, proceeding with dispatches to
the Duke of Wellington, immediately accompanied me to the next post.
Here I learnt with great pleasure, that this advanced guard of cavalry
was commanded by Prince William of Prussia, whose first Aid-de-camp,
Baron Rochow, was my particular friend.
‘I soon arrived at the spot where Prince William and his Staff were
sleeping in a field, before a large fire, under some trees. I inquired
for my friend, Baron Rochow. His name was called, and I immediately had
the pleasure of seeing him. After a few urgent questions, he proposed to
introduce me to Prince William, who by this time had raised himself upon
his mattrass. The Prince received me with the greatest politeness, and
directed that I should be presented with refreshments. On my taking
leave, he ordered me to be furnished with an escort to General Baron
Bulow. I arrived at this General’s quarters at break of day, and was
soon after introduced to him. While I was at breakfast with him, he told
me that he wished me to see Prince Blucher on my way to the Duke of
Wellington; and added, that he would send his Aid-de-camp with me. He
then ordered his servant to call his Aid-de-camp, Baron Echardstein, to
whom I was also particularly known.
‘On our arrival at Prince Blucher’s, my companion, Baron Echardstein
informed him that I was going on a mission from the French Government to
the Duke of Wellington; this did not seem to please the Prince, who
immediately retired to rest, and left me to converse with his
Chef-d’etat-Major. This gentleman, whose name I believe was Gneisenau,
was very indignant on being informed of the desire of the French to
treat with the Duke of Wellington; and he completely lost his temper
when he observed the coolness with which I listened to his indiscreet
and authoritative language.
‘On my quitting this choleric soldier, my friend Echardstein thought it
necessary to apologise to me for the indelicate behaviour of his
countryman. I proceeded on my journey, and soon met numerous columns of
English cavalry, and found the five French Deputies, waiting for the
Duke’s arrival, at a village called Fresnoy. I thought it expedient to
endeavour to see the Duke before the Deputies, and therefore passed them
on the road. I shortly after met the Duke, and imparted to him the
purport of my mission, and delivered to him also a sealed dispatch from
Fouché, upon which he desired me to accompany him to the village where
the Deputies were. He asked me if I was acquainted with the nature of
the mission. I told him that I knew that one part of it, at least, was
to request an armistice of some days, until news could arrive from other
Deputies, who had been sent to treat with the united Sovereigns.
‘On the Duke’s arrival at the village of Fresnoy, he conferred with the
Deputies for five hours. They adduced, in support of their missions, the
solemn declaration of the British Ministers, “that it was not the
intention of the Allies to force the Bourbons, or any other government,
on the French people; that they had made war against Napoleon only, and
not against the nation,” &c. Their mission failed. They received for
answer, that the only thing left for the Chambers to do was to proclaim
Louis 18th.
‘The Duke then proceeded to Plessis, the head-quarters for that day. The
Deputies remained behind. I was desired by the Duke to accompany him to
Plessis, where I dined with him, and during dinner conversed with him on
the object I had to propose respecting an armistice. Before I took my
leave of the Duke, I requested that he would give me some answer to the
remonstrances of the Commission of Government, which stated, “_that as
the Allies had declared their hostility to be directed against the
person of Napoleon only, it would be but just to await the result of the
mission to the Sovereigns, before his Grace undertook to replace Louis
18th on the throne_.” The Duke, in the presence of Lord March, Colonels
Hervey, Freemantle, Abercromby, and several other officers, replied,—“I
can give no other answer than that which you know _I have just given_ to
the Deputies. _Tell them (the Commission of Government) that they had
better immediately proclaim the King (Louis 18th). I cannot treat till
then, nor upon any other condition. Their King is here at hand: let them
send their submission to him._”
We are glad the Duke is not an Englishman?[32]
‘The Duke was at this time in constant communication with King Louis and
Talleyrand, who were together in the rear of the army; and I saw one of
the messengers of Louis 18th at the Duke’s head-quarters.—I returned to
Paris the next morning. Davoust had taken the chief command of the
French army, and had fixed his head-quarters at the Barriere de la
Villette, by which I entered Paris. On my being introduced to him, he
demanded to know the object of my mission to the enemy, and said, that
as he then held the supreme command, I must communicate to him any
dispatches of which I might be the bearer? I answered him, that I had no
written message; that my mission had been nearly similar to that of the
Deputies; that I had been sent out by the Commission, and therefore
thought it my duty to account with its members only for my proceedings.
I could, however, inform him of the declaration, which, in common with
the Deputies, I had received from the Duke of Wellington. Hereupon I
reported to him the Duke’s _sine qua non_. He immediately declared that
my intelligence was incredible, and expressed his disbelief of it in the
strongest terms. Then, with the greatest emotion, and with uplifted
hands and eyes, _he called heaven to witness the perfidy and arrogant
injustice of the English Ministry, and of the Allies_. “_The Duke of
Wellington_,” said he, “_surely could never dare to make a declaration
so directly contrary to the avowed and solemnly protested intentions of
the British Ministry, and of the other Allies_. _Have not they sworn
that they would not impose a sovereign on the French people? However,
they will find to their cost, that we are unanimous in our resolution.
Napoleon can no longer be the pretext for their hostilities. We will all
perish rather than submit to the hateful yoke that Lord Castlereagh
would impose upon us! —— is a traitor! he was about to compromise with
the enemy—I have taken his command from him—he shall never again command
a corporal’s guard—we are an independent nation—England should be the
last power to tyrannize over us in our choice of a government._”—He then
desired me to proceed to lay before the Commission at the Thuilleries
the result of my mission, adding, “they know very well that I have now
with me more than 100,000 men, with 500 pieces of cannon, and 25,000
cavalry.”
‘I proceeded to the palace of the Thuilleries, where I was introduced to
the Commission. Carnot immediately asked, what my errand to the enemy
had been? Fouché quickly answered, that he had sent me. Quinette and
Grenier looked as if they were not satisfied with this answer. Carnot
continued to address me, and asked whether I had seen the Deputies at
the Duke of Wellington’s head-quarters? I answered in the affirmative,
and that I could give him an account of the result of their mission:
upon this they became attentive, and heard my account with dismay and
indignation. Carnot expressed the same sentiments that Davoust had
recently done; and added, rather roughly, that he could by no means give
credit to my account, either as to the Duke of Wellington’s _sine qua
non_, or as to the force of the enemy in the vicinity of Paris: he
further said, with a sneer, “we shall have, I hope, a very different
account on the return of the Deputies.” Fouché defended me, and reproved
him for so uncivilly questioning my veracity, and assured him that he
might put implicit confidence in me. Carnot and Grenier then took me to
a topographical map, and questioned me as to the movements of the Duke
of Wellington? I answered their interrogatories to the extent to which I
thought myself warranted: and it appeared that I informed them of
nothing with which they were not already acquainted. Carnot then, in a
polite manner, told me I might retire.
‘It would appear, that in consequence of having learned from me the
nature of the communication which the Deputies would have to make to the
Chambers, and dreading its discouraging effects on the members, and on
the people at large, their return to Paris had been prevented. Some
private orders seem to have been given to that effect; for on the same
day that I entered Paris by the Barriere de la Villette, the Deputies
approached that part, preceded by Colonel Latour Maubourg, who was
attached to their mission, when the French out-posts fired, killed the
Prussian trumpeter’s horse, and a ball grazed the epaulette of the
Colonel. The Deputies turned back, and attempted to enter by the
Barriere de St. Dennis, but were refused. They there received fresh
instructions to treat, and it was so managed, that they did not return
to Paris till after the capitulation.
‘In the mean time Fouché and his coadjutors, who opposed the views of
the other parties, were in great personal danger. The three other
Members of the Commission more than suspected them of duplicity and
treachery; and in consequence impeached them before the Chamber of
Deputies. The Duke of Wellington being acquainted with these
proceedings, sent a message to the Members of the Commission, as I was
informed, assuring them that if any harm befel Fouché or Caulincourt, he
would infallibly _hang up the other three on his arrival in Paris_.[33]
‘It was proposed in the Chamber of Deputies, that its Members should
quit Paris with the army, and rally round them all those who would
oppose the enemy and the Bourbons. But this measure Fouché was
particularly anxious to thwart, whilst Davoust feeling himself confident
in the strength of his army, insisted on attacking Blucher and the Duke
of Wellington before other reinforcements should arrive; but as I
understood at the time, Fouché succeeded in somewhat softening and in
giving a new direction to the policy of Carnot: and it is certain that
he managed to gain over Davoust by urging the force of the enemy, and
the dreadful consequences that would ensue if Paris should be taken by
assault. He pleaded the reliance which might be placed _on the faith of
the English_ (for with the Prussians the French would not have treated
on any terms). He therefore recommended Davoust to evacuate Paris, and
not to listen to the desperate suggestions of the Chambers, observing,
that so long as his army remained entire, he might obtain favourable
terms for all parties.
‘The day before the capitulation of Paris (2d July), I repaired to the
British camp with the following memorandum, as my instructions, from
Fouché to the Duke of Wellington:—
‘“The army opposes, because uneasy—assure it, it will even become
devoted.
‘“The Chambers are counter for the same reason. _Assure every body you
will have every body._
‘“The army sent away, the Chambers will agree, on according them the
guarantee, as added to the charter and promised by the king. In order to
be well understood, it is necessary to explain; therefore not to enter
Paris before three days, and in the meantime every thing may be
arranged.
‘“The Chambers will be gained, will believe in their independence, and
will agree to every thing. Persuasion, not force, must be used with the
Chambers.”
‘On my arrival at the British advanced posts, which, owing to the
obstructions I met with from the French, I was not able to effect till
early in the morning of the 3d July, I was informed that the most
positive orders had been given by the duke, not to allow any messenger
to pass from Paris without his special permission. I was therefore
detained at the English advanced post of guards, commanded by Lord
Saltown. I dined with the officers of the advanced piquet, among whom I
well remember Captain Fairfield, of the foot guards. These gentlemen
informed me that the Duke of Wellington was at Gonnesse, with Sir C.
Stuart, Pozzo di Borgo, and Talleyrand. I wrote a letter to the duke,
which was forwarded by Lord Saltown. In my letter, I entered into a
detail of the line of conduct recommended by Fouché, and contained in
the foregoing memorandum. On the receipt of my dispatch, the duke
immediately proceeded to St. Cloud, General Blucher’s head-quarters;
there the capitulation of Paris was signed. The duke returned to
Gonnesse and dispatched Lord March to bring me to him: I arrived very
early on the morning of the 4th, and found Sir C. Stuart, Talleyrand,
and Pozzo di Borgo; they assembled in council, and my presence was
required by the duke. Talleyrand observed to me, that _this was already
settled_, and, turning to the Duke of Wellington, requested him to read
to me _the capitulation that they had just concluded_. On my urging the
adoption of the line of conduct which Fouché recommended towards the
Chambers, the Duke of Wellington proceeded to give me his sentiments in
writing, which were as follow:—
‘“_Je pense, que les Allies ayant déclaré le Gouvernment de Napoleon une
Usurpation et nonlégitime, toute autorité qui émane de lui, doit être
regardée comme nulle et d’aucun pouvoir.[34] Ainsi, ce qui reste à faire
aux Chambres et à la commission, est, de donner de suite leur démission
et de déclarer qu’ils n’ont pris sur eux les responsibilités de
gouvernement, que pour assurer la tranquilité publique, et l’intégrité
du royaume de S. M. Louis XVIII._”
‘Talleyrand, Sir Charles Stuart, and Pozzo di Borgo, each took a copy of
this document, and each, by way of memorandum, put their names and mine
to the paper, by way of recording, as I suppose, the parties present at
the discussion.
‘I forthwith mounted my horse and returned to Paris; Lord March was
appointed by the duke to accompany me. On our arrival at the Barriere de
la Villette, we found the French soldiery perfectly frantic, and
vociferating “_Vive l’Empereur!_” “_A bas les Anglais!_” “_A bas les
Bourbons!_” They were on the point of firing at the Belgian trumpeter
who preceded us: it was with the greatest difficulty that some French
hussars, under whose escort we had approached the barriers, could
prevent the soldiers from firing at Lord March as he was riding off.
They were also obliged to exert themselves strenuously in my defence, as
many of the infantry pointed their muskets at me, vociferating “_Vive
l’Empereur!_” “_Vive Napoleon!_” “We are betrayed!” “We have been sold!”
“We will fight to the last drop of our blood!” “Down with the Bourbons!”
“Let us kill this traitor!” “He has assisted in selling us!” “We have
seen him pass before!” The hussars took me between them, some of the
infantry also assisted in parrying off the blows aimed at me, and
turning aside the muzzles of the muskets. Thus, after great peril, I was
fortunate enough to gain the quarters of a general officer, with only a
sabre cut on my left leg. The general dispersed the men, and gave me a
strong escort to conduct me to the Thuilleries.
‘In consequence of my communicating the documents and assurances I had
received from Talleyrand and the Duke of Wellington, the commission of
government abdicated its powers that evening; but the Chambers still
refused to comply; they continued their sittings, which they declared
should be permanent, till the morning of the 6th, when the doors of the
Chamber were closed, and guarded by a party of the national guards.
‘On this, above one hundred and fifty of the deputies proceeded to the
house of M. Lanjuinais, their president, and there framed a solemn
protest against the arbitrary and illegal violence which had been used
towards them, _in violation of the most solemn declarations_.
‘I have now no doubt that some extraordinary scheme had been contrived
to seduce Napoleon into the measure of abdicating the throne in favour
of his son. His resources were at that moment immense. The regular army
in Paris alone, amounted to more than 80,000 men, every individual of
which was animated with the most enthusiastic ardour. The national
guard, above 30,000 strong, displayed the firmest resolution to obey the
directions of the constituted authorities; numerous volunteers of all
classes had taken up arms in the defence of their country. In the
departments, the spirit of opposition to the invaders was still greater,
particularly in the north, west, and east: in fine, Napoleon, who could
not possibly be ignorant of the state of his resources, would never, I
am convinced, have sheathed his sword, and abdicated the crown _even in
favour of his son_, had he not been most confidently assured of the
validity of the measure, and its being approved and supported by the
French senate and people, and by at least _some part_ of the coalition.
‘What were the precise representations by which Napoleon was influenced
to take this step, is perhaps known only to its contrivers, and their
victim. Some future historian may probably unfold this mystery. As far
as regards the share I had in the negociations between the provisional
government, the allied armies, and Talleyrand, as minister of Louis
XVIII., I feel it due to myself to declare, that _I had no suspicion of
any deception or intended breach of engagements._ I was requested to
open a communication between Fouché and the Duke of Wellington, for the
avowed purpose of negociating an armistice, as a preliminary measure to
the capitulation of Paris; and it was obvious that such a negociation
might save the lives of thousands of my countrymen.’
THE PLAY IS OVER, NOW LET US GO TO SUPPER.
John Bull, John Bull, John Bull, read the above account twice over,
think well of it, and then say why you should not wear the yoke, which
you have put round the neck of others, round your own. Ah! John, thou
art not a metaphysician: thou dost lack a concatenation of ideas!—We are
not proud of the share which as Englishmen we had in the proceedings
recorded by Mr. Macirone: but we have one consolation for our national
pride, Fouché and Talleyrand are Frenchmen. These two pettifogging
miscreants seem to have made themselves perfect in the advice of the
fool in _Lear_: ‘Let go thy hold, when a great wheel runs down hill,
lest it should break thy neck with following it: but the great one that
goes upwards, let it draw thee after. When a wise man gives thee better
counsel, give me mine again: I would have none but knaves follow it.’
The great wheel, however, in this instance, kicked off the two knaves,
that followed the fool’s advice. One of these famous persons now writes
letters of apology to the Duke of Wellington, and the other to Lord
Castlereagh. They are not so well off as Murat and Berthier, one of whom
was legitimately shot through the head, and the other legitimately
thrown out of a window, if we are to believe Mr. Macirone, that he might
die in _the good cause_—‘a master-leaver, and a fugitive.’
WAT TYLER; A DRAMATIC POEM.
THE QUARTERLY REVIEW: _Article_, ‘ON PARLIAMENTARY REFORM.’
‘So was it when my life began,
So is it now I am a man:
So shall it be when I grow old and die.
The child’s the father of the man:
Our years flow on
Link’d each to each by natural piety.’—WORDSWORTH.
_March 9, 1817._
According to this theory of personal continuity, the author of the
Dramatic Poem, to be here noticed, is the father of Parliamentary Reform
in the Quarterly Review. It is said to be a wise child that knows its
own father: and we understand Mr. Southey (who is in this case reputed
father and son) utterly disclaims the hypostatical union between the
Quarterly Reviewer and the Dramatic Poet, and means to enter an
injunction against the latter, as a bastard and impostor. Appearances
are somewhat staggering against the legitimacy of the descent, yet we
perceive a strong family-likeness remaining, in spite of the lapse of
years and alteration of circumstances. We should not, indeed, be able to
predict that the author of _Wat Tyler_ would ever write the article on
Parliamentary Reform; nor should we, either at first or second sight,
perceive that the Quarterly Reviewer had ever written a poem like that
which is before us: but if we were told that both performances were
literally and _bonâ fide_ by the same person, we should have little
hesitation in saying to Mr. Southey, ‘Thou art the man.’ We know no
other person in whom ‘fierce extremes’ meet with such mutual
self-complacency: whose opinions change so much without any change in
the author’s mind; who lives so entirely in the ‘present ignorant
thought,’ without the smallest ‘discourse of reason looking before or
after.’ Mr. Southey is a man incapable of reasoning connectedly on any
subject. He has not strength of mind to see the whole of any question;
he has not modesty to suspend his judgment till he has examined the
grounds of it. He can comprehend but one idea at a time, and that is
always an extreme one; because he will neither listen to, nor tolerate
any thing that can disturb or moderate the petulance of his
self-opinion. _The woman that deliberates is lost._ So it is with the
effeminate soul of Mr. Southey. Any concession is fatal to his
consistency; and he can only keep out of one absurdity by the
tenaciousness with which he stickles for another. He calls to the aid of
his disjointed opinions a proportionate quantity of spleen; and
regularly makes up for the weakness of his own _reasons_, by charging
others with _bad motives_. The terms _knave and fool_, _wise and good_,
have undergone a total change in the last twenty years: the former he
applies to all those who agreed with him formerly—the latter to all
those who agree with him now. His public spirit was then a prude and a
scold; and ‘his poor virtue,’ turned into a literary prostitute, is
grown more abusive than ever. Wat Tyler and the Quarterly Review are an
illustration of these remarks. The author of Wat Tyler was an
Ultra-jacobin; the author of Parliamentary Reform is an Ultra-royalist;
the one was a frantic demagogue; the other is a servile court-tool: the
one maintained second-hand paradoxes; the other repeats second-hand
common-places: the one vented those opinions which gratified the vanity
of youth; the other adopts those prejudices which are most conducive to
the convenience of age: the one saw nothing but the abuses of power; the
other sees nothing but the horrors of resistance to those abuses: the
one did not stop short of general anarchy; the other goes the whole
length of despotism; the one vilified kings, priests, and nobles; the
other vilifies the people: the one was for universal suffrage and
perfect equality; the other is for seat-selling, and the increasing
influence of the Crown: the one admired the preaching of John Ball; the
other recommends the Suspension of the Habeas Corpus, and the putting
down of the _Examiner_ by the sword, the dagger, or the thumb-screw; for
the pen, Mr. Southey tells us, is not sufficient. We wonder that in all
this contempt which our prose-poet has felt at different times for
different persons and things, he has never felt any dissatisfaction with
himself, or distrust of his own infallibility. Our differing from others
sometimes staggers our confidence in our own conclusions: if we had been
chargeable with as many contradictions as Mr. Southey, we suppose we
should have had the same senseless self-sufficiency. A changeling is
your only oracle. Those who have undergone a total change of sentiment
on important questions, ought certainly to learn modesty in themselves,
and moderation towards others; on the contrary, they are generally the
most violent in their own opinions, and the most intolerant towards
others; the reason of which we have shewn elsewhere, to the satisfaction
of the proprietor of the _Old Times_. Before we have done, we shall,
perhaps, do the same thing to the satisfaction of the publisher of the
Quarterly Review; for the Mr. Murrays and the Mr. Walters, the patrons
of the band of gentlemen-pensioners and servile authors, have ‘a sort of
squint’ in their understanding, and look less to the dirty sacrifices of
their drudges, or the dirtier they are ready to make, than to their
standing well with that great keeper, the public, for purity and
innocence. The band of gentlemen-pensioners and servile authors do not
know what to make of this, and hardly believe it: we shall in time
convince them.
But to proceed to our extracts:—
MORCEAU I.
_Wat Tyler._ Hob—I have only six groats in the world,
And they must soon by law be taken from me.
_Hob._ Curse on these taxes—one succeeds another—
Our ministers—panders of a king’s will—
Drain all our wealth away—waste it in revels—
And lure or force away our boys, who should be
The props of our old age!—to fill their armies,
And feed the crows of France! Year follows year,
And still we madly prosecute the war;—
Draining our wealth—distressing our poor peasants—
Slaughtering our youths—and all to crown our Chiefs
With glory!—I detest the hell-sprung name.
_Tyler._ What matters me who wears the crown of France?
Whether a Richard or a Charles possess it?
They reap the glory—they enjoy the spoil—
We pay—we bleed! The sun would shine as cheerly,
The rains of heaven as seasonably fall,
Tho’ neither of these royal pests existed.
_Hob._ Nay—as for that, we poor men should fare better!
No legal robbers then should force away
The hard-earn’d wages of our honest toil.
The Parliament for ever cries _more money,
The service of the State demands more money_.
Just heaven! of what service is the State?
_Tyler._ Oh! ’tis of vast importance! Who should pay for
The luxuries and riots of the court?
Who should support the flaunting courtier’s pride,
Pay for their midnight revels, their rich garments,
Did not the State enforce?—Think ye, my friend,
That I—a humble blacksmith, here at Deptford,
Would part with these six groats—earn’d by hard toil,
All that I have! to massacre the Frenchmen;
Murder as enemies men I never saw,
Did not the State compel me!
(_Tax-gatherers pass by._) There they go,
Privileg’d r——s!
MORCEAU II.
_Piers._ Fare not the birds well, as from spray to spray
Blithsome they bound—yet find their simple food
Scattered abundantly?
_Tyler._ _No fancied boundaries of mine and thine
Restrain their wanderings_: Nature gives enough
For all; but Man, with arrogant selfishness,
Proud of his heaps, hoards up superfluous stores
Robb’d from his weaker fellows, starves the poor,
Or gives to pity what he owes to justice!
_Piers._ So I have heard our good friend John Ball preach.
_Alice._ My father, wherefore was John Ball imprisoned?
Was he not charitable, good, and pious?
I have heard him say that all mankind are brethren,
And that like brethren they should love each other;—
Was not that doctrine pious?
_Tyler._ Rank sedition—
High treason, every syllable, my child!
The priests cry out on him for heresy;
The nobles all detest him as a rebel;
And this good man, this minister of Christ,
This man, the friend and brother of mankind,
Lingers in the dark dungeon!
MORCEAU III.
_Tyler._ Piers, I have not been idle,
I never ate the bread of indolence—
Could Alice be more thrifty than her mother?
Yet but with one child, and that one, how good
Thou knowest; I scarcely can provide the wants
Of nature: look at these wolves of the law,
They come to drain me of my hard-earn’d wages.
I have already paid the heavy tax
Laid on the wool that clothes me—on my leather—
On all the needful articles of life!
And now three groats (and I work’d hard to earn them)
The Parliament demands—and I must pay them,
Forsooth, for liberty to wear my head.
_Enter Tax-gatherers._
_Collector._ Three groats a-head for all your family.
_Piers._ Why is this money gathered?—’tis a hard tax
On the poor labourer!—it can never be
That government should thus distress the people.
Go to the rich for money—honest labour
Ought to enjoy its fruits.
_Col._ The State wants money.
War is expensive—’tis a glorious war,
A war of honour, and must be supported.—
Three groats a-head.
_Tyler._ There, three for my own head,
Three for my wife’s!—What will the State tax next?
_Col._ You have a daughter.
_Tyler._ She is below the age—not yet fifteen.
_Col._ You would evade the tax.—
_Tyler._ Sir Officer,
I have paid you fairly what the law demands.
[_Alice and her Mother enter the Shop. The Tax-gatherers go to
her. One of them lays hold of her. She screams. Tyler goes
in._]
_Col._ You say she’s under age.
[_Alice screams again. Tyler knocks out the Tax-gatherer’s
brains. His Companions fly._]
_Piers._ A just revenge.
_Tyler._ Most just indeed; but in the eye of the law
’Tis murder—and the murderer’s lot is mine.
MORCEAU IV.—SONG.
‘When Adam delv’d and Eve span,
‘Who was then the gentleman?’
Wretched is the infant’s lot,
Born within the straw-roof’d cot!
Be he generous, wise, or brave,
He must only be a slave,
Long, long labour, little rest,
Still to toil to be oppress’d;
Drain’d by taxes of his store,
Punish’d next for being poor;
That is the poor wretch’s lot,
Born within the straw-roof’d cot.
While the peasant works—to sleep;
What the peasant sows—to reap;
On the couch of ease to lie,
Rioting in revelry:
Be he villain, be he fool,
Still to hold despotic rule,
Trampling on his slaves with scorn;
This is to be nobly born.
‘When Adam delv’d and Eve span,
‘Who was then the gentleman?’
MORCEAU V.
_John Ball._ Friends! Brethren! for ye are my brethren all;
Englishmen met in arms to advocate
The cause of freedom! hear me! pause awhile
In the career of vengeance; it is true
I am a priest; but, as these rags may speak,
Not one who riots in the poor man’s spoil,
Or trades with his religion. I am one
Who preach the law of Christ, and in my life
Would practise what he taught. The Son of God
Came not to you in power:—humble in mien,
Lowly in heart, the man of Nazareth
Preach’d mercy, justice, love: ‘Woe unto ye,
Ye that are rich:—if that ye would be saved,
Sell that ye have, and give unto the poor.’
So taught the Saviour: oh, my honest friends!
Have ye not felt the strong indignant throb
Of justice in your bosoms, to behold
The lordly baron feasting on your spoils?
Have you not in your hearts arraign’d the lot
That gave him on the couch of luxury
To pillow his head, and pass the festive day
In sportive feasts, and ease, and revelry?
Have you not often in your conscience ask’d
Why is the difference, wherefore should that man
No worthier than myself, thus lord it over me,
And bid me labour, and enjoy the fruits?
The God within your breasts has argued thus!
The voice of truth has murmur’d; came he not
As helpless to the world?—shines not the sun
With equal ray on both?—do ye not feel
The self-same winds of heaven as keenly parch ye?
Abundant is the earth—the Sire of all
Saw and pronounced that it was very good.
Look round: the vernal fields smile with new flowers,
The budding orchard perfumes the soft breeze,
And the green corn waves to the passing gale.
There is enough for all, but your proud baron
Stands up, and, arrogant of strength, exclaims,
‘I am a lord—by nature I am noble:
These fields are mine, for I was born to them,
I was born in the castle—you, poor wretches,
Whelp’d in the cottage, are by birth my slaves.’
Almighty God! such blasphemies are uttered!
Almighty God! such blasphemies believ’d!
_Tom Miller._ This is something like a sermon.
_Jack Straw._ Where’s the bishop
Would tell you truths like these?
_Hob._ There was never a bishop among all the apostles.
_John Ball._ My brethren!
_Piers._ Silence, the good priest speaks.
_John Ball._ My brethren, these are truths, and weighty ones
Ye are all equal; nature made ye so.
Equality is your birthright;—when I gaze
On the proud palace, and behold one man
In the blood-purpled robes of royalty,
Feasting at ease, and lording over millions;
Then turn me to the hut of poverty,
And see the wretched labourer, worn with toil,
Divide his scanty morsel with his infants;
I sicken, and, indignant at the sight,
‘Blush for the patience of humanity.’
_Jack Straw._ We will assert our rights.
MORCEAU VI.
_Tyler._ King of England,
_Petitioning for pity_ is most weak,
The sovereign people ought to _demand justice_.
I killed your officer, for his lewd hand
Insulted a maid’s modesty; your subjects
I lead to rebel against the Lord’s anointed,
Because his ministers have made him odious:
His yoke is heavy, and his burden grievous.
Why do we carry on this fatal war,
To force upon the French a king they hate;
Tearing our young men from their peaceful homes;
Forcing his hard-earn’d fruits from the honest peasant;
Distressing us to desolate our neighbours?
Why is this ruinous poll-tax imposed,
But to support your court’s extravagance,
And your mad title to the crown of France?
Shall we sit tamely down beneath these evils,
Petitioning for pity?
King of England!
Why are we sold like cattle in your markets—
Deprived of every privilege of man?
Must we lie tamely at our tyrant’s feet,
And, like your spaniels, lick the hand that beats us?
You sit at ease in your gay palaces,
The costly banquet courts your appetite,
Sweet music sooths your slumbers; we the while,
Scarce by hard toil can earn a little food,
And sleep scarce shelter’d from the cold night wind:
While your wild projects wrest the little from us
Which might have cheered the wintry hour of age:
The parliament for ever asks more money:
We toil and sweat for money for your taxes;
Where is the benefit, what food reap we
From all the councils of your government?
Think you that we should quarrel with the French?
What boots to us your victories, your glory?
We pay, we fight, you profit at your ease.
Do you not claim the country as your own?
Do you not call the venison of the forest,
The birds of heaven your own?—prohibiting us,
Even tho’ in want of food, to seize the prey
Which nature offers?—King! is all this just?
Think you we do not feel the wrongs we suffer?
The hour of retribution is at hand,
And tyrants tremble—mark me, King of England.
MORCEAU VII.
_Hob._ ’Twas well order’d,
I place but little trust in courtly faith.
_John Ball._ We must remain embodied; else the king
Will plunge again in royal luxury;
And when the storm of danger is past over,
Forget his promises.
_Hob._ Aye, like an aguish sinner,
He’ll promise to repent when the fit’s on him;
When well recover’d, laugh at his own terrors.
_Piers._ Oh! I am griev’d that we must gain so little!
Why are not all these empty ranks abolish’d,
King, slave, and lord, ‘ennobl’d into MAN?’
Are we not equal all?—have you not told me,
Equality is the sacred right of man,
Inalienable, tho’ by force withheld?
_John Ball._ Even so; but Piers, my frail and fallible judgment
Knows hardly to decide if it be right,
Peaceably to return, content with little,
With this half restitution of our rights,
Or boldly to proceed thro’ blood and slaughter,
Till we should all be equal and all happy.
I chose the milder way:—perhaps I erred.
_Piers._ I fear me—by the mass, the unsteady people
Are flocking homewards! how the multitude
Diminishes!
MORCEAU THE LAST.
_John Ball._ Why, be it so. I can smile at your vengeance:
For I am arm’d with rectitude of soul.
The truth, which all my life I have divulg’d,
And am now doom’d in torment to expire for,
Shall still survive—the destin’d hour must come,
When it shall blaze with sun-surpassing splendor,
And the dark mists of prejudice and falsehood
Fade in its strong effulgence. Flattery’s incense
No more shall shadow round the gore-dyed throne;
That altar of oppression, fed with rites
More savage than the priests of Moloch taught,
Shall be consumed amid the fire of Justice:
The ray of truth shall emanate around,
And the whole world be lighted!
This will do.
THE COURIER AND ‘THE WAT TYLER.’
Doth not the appetite alter? A man loves the meat in his youth, that
he cannot endure in his age. Shall quips and sentences, and these
paper bullets of the brain awe a man from the career of his
humour?—_Much Ado about Nothing._
_March 30, 1817._
Instead of applying for an injunction against _Wat Tyler_, Mr. Southey
would do well to apply for an injunction against Mr. Coleridge, who has
undertaken his defence in _The Courier_. If he can escape from the
ominous patronage of that gentleman’s pen, he has nothing to fear from
his own. ‘The _Wat Tyler_,’ as Mr. Coleridge has personified it, can do
the author no great harm: it only proves that he was once a wild
enthusiast: of the two characters, for which Mr. Southey is a candidate
with the public, this is the most creditable for him to appear in. At
present his reputation ‘somewhat smacks.’ A strong dose of the Jacobin
spirit of _Wat Tyler_ may be of use to get the sickly taste of the
Poet-laureate and the Quarterly Reviewer out of our mouths.
The best thing for Mr. Southey (if we might be allowed to advise) would
be for his friends to say nothing about him, and for him to say nothing
about other people. We have nothing to do with Mr. Southey ‘the man,’ or
even with Mr. Southey the apostate; but we have something to do with Mr.
Southey the spy and informer. Is it not a little strange, that while
this gentleman is getting an injunction against himself as the author of
_Wat Tyler_, he is recommending gagging bills against us, and the making
up by force for his deficiency in argument! There is a want of keeping
in this; but Mr. Southey and his friends delight in practical and
speculative contradictions. What are we to think of a man who is ‘now a
flagitious incendiary,’ (to use the epithets which Mr. Southey applies
to the Editor of the _Examiner_) ‘a palliater of murder, insurrection,
and treason,’ and anon a pensioned scribbler of court poetry and court
politics? If the writer of the article on Parliamentary Reform thinks
the Editor of this Paper ‘a flagitious incendiary,’ ‘a palliater of
murder, insurrection, and treason,’ what does the Quarterly Reviewer
think of the author of _Wat Tyler_? What, on the other hand, does the
author of _Wat Tyler_ think of the Quarterly Reviewer? What does Mr.
Southey, who certainly makes a very aukward figure between the two,
think of himself? Mr. Coleridge indeed steps in to the assistance of his
friend in this dilemma, and says (unsaying all that he says besides)
that the ultra-jacobinical opinions advanced in _Wat Tyler_ were ‘more
an honour to the writer’s heart than an imputation on his
understanding?’ Be it so. The Editor of this Paper will, we dare say,
agree to this statement from disinterested motives, (for he is not
answerable for any ultra-jacobinical opinions) as we suppose Mr. Southey
will accede to it from pure self-love. He hardly thinks that he was ‘a
knave and fool’ formerly, as he calls all those who formerly agreed or
now differ with him: he only thinks with Mr. Coleridge and _The
Courier_, that he was not quite so ‘wise and virtuous’ then, as he is at
present! Why then not extend the same charitable interpretation to those
who have held a middle course between his opposite extravagances? We are
sure, that to be thought _a little less wise and virtuous_ than that
celebrated person thinks himself, would content the ambition of any
moderate man. Will he allow of nothing short of the utmost intolerance
of jacobinism or anti-jacobinism? Or will he tolerate this intolerance
in nobody but himself? This seems to be his feeling: and it also seems
to be Mr. Coleridge’s opinion, whose maudlin methodistical casuistry
leads him to clothe Mr. Southey’s political sins with apostacy as with a
garment, and to plead one excess of folly and indecency as a competent
set-off against another. To be a renegado, is, with him, to be virtuous.
The greater the sinner the greater the saint, says _The Courier_. Mr.
Southey’s Muse is confessedly not a vestal; but then she is what is much
better, a Magdalen. Now a Magdalen is a person who has returned to her
first habits and notions of virtue: but Mr. Southey’s laurelled Muse is
at present in high court-keeping, and tosses up her nose at the very
mention of reform. Nor do we think Mr. Southey has a fairer claim to the
degree of respectability good-naturedly assigned him by his friends,
that of a pickpocket or highwayman turned thief-taker or king’s
evidence; for he in fact belies his own character to blacken every
honest principle, and takes the government reward for betraying better
men than himself. There are, as _The Courier_ observes, youthful
indiscretions; but there are also riper and more deliberate errors. A
woman is more liable to prostitute her person at nineteen—a man is more
likely to prostitute his understanding at forty. We do not see the exact
parallel which _The Courier_ sets up between moral repentance and
political profligacy. A man, says _The Courier_, may surely express an
abhorrence of his past vices, as of drunkenness. Yes; and he may also
express a great abhorrence of his present vices, because his own
opinion, as well as that of all impartial persons, condemns his conduct;
but it would be curious if a man were to express a great abhorrence of
his present opinions, and it is only a less degree of absurdity for a
man to express a great abhorrence of his past opinions; for if he was
not a hypocrite, he must have held those opinions, as he holds his
present ones, because he thought them right. A man is at liberty to
condemn his errors in practice as much as he pleases: it is a point
agreed upon. But he is not at liberty to condemn his errors in theory at
the same unmerciful rate, because many people still think them right;
because it is the height of arrogance in him to assume his own forfeited
opinion as the invariable standard of right and wrong, and the height of
indecency to ascribe the conclusions of others to bad motives, by which
he can only arraign his own. Certainly, all the presumption of indirect
and dishonest motives lies against Mr. Southey’s unlooked-for
conversion, and not against his original principles. Will he deny this
himself? He must then retract what he says in the Quarterly Review; for
he there says, that ‘the late war was so popular for three and twenty
years together, that for any one to be against it,’ (and much more, to
be a Jacobin, as he was, half that time,) ‘exposed him to contempt,
insult, persecution, the loss of property, and even of life.’ The odds,
we grant, were against Mr. Southey’s pure reason; they proved too much
for it. According, however, to the new theory of political integrity, to
be a steady, consistent, conscientious Whig or Tory, is nothing. It is
the change of opinion that stamps its value on it; and the more
outrageous the change, the more meritorious the stigma attached to it.
It is the sacrifice of all principle, that is the triumph of corruption;
it is the shameless effrontery of a desertion of the people, that is the
chief recommendation to the panders of a court; it is the contempt, the
grinning scorn and infamy, which is poured on all patriotism and
independence, by shewing the radical baseness and fickleness of its
professors in the most startling point of view, that strengthens the
rotten foundations of power, by degrading human nature. Poor Bob
Southey! how they laugh at him! What are the abuse and contumely which
we are in the habit of bestowing upon him, compared with the cordial
contempt, the flickering sneers, that play round the lips of his
new-fangled friends, when they see ‘the Man of Humanity’ decked out in
the trappings of his prostitution, and feel the rankling venom of their
hearts soothed by the flattering reflection that virtue and genius are
mere marketable commodities! What a squeeze must that be which Mr.
Canning gives the hand that wrote the Sonnet to Old Sarum, and the
Defence of Rotten Boroughs in the Quarterly Review! Mr. Canning was at
first suspected of being the author of this last article: no one has
attributed _Wat Tyler_ to the classical pen of that glib orator and
consistent anti-jacobin. Yet what are the pretensions of that
gentleman’s profligate consistency opposed to Mr. Southey’s profligate
versatility; what a pitiful spectacle does his sneaking, servile
adherence to a party make, compared with Mr. Southey’s barefaced and
magnanimous desertion of one! Mr. Canning has indeed served a cause; Mr.
Southey has betrayed one. Mr. Canning threw contempt on the cause of
liberty by his wit; Mr. Southey has done it by his want of principle.
‘This, this is the unkindest blow of all.’ We should not mind any thing
but that;—that is the reflection that stabs us:
—— —— —— ——‘That the law
By which mankind now suffers, is most just.
For by superior energies; more strict
Affiance with each other; faith more firm
In their unhallow’d principles; the bad
Have fairly earned a victory o’er the weak,
The vacillating, inconsistent good.’
Mr. Coleridge thinks that this triumph over himself and the
Poet-laureate is a triumph to us. God forbid! It shews that he knows as
little about us as he does about himself. This question of apostacy may
be summed up in a very few words:—First, if Mr. Southey is not an
apostate, we should like to know who ever was? Secondly, whether the
term, apostate, is a term of reproach? If it has ceased to be so, it is
another among the triumphs of the present king’s reign, and a greater
proof than any brought forward in the Quarterly Review, of the progress
of public spirit and political independence among us of late years! A
man may change his opinion. Good. But if he changes his opinion as his
interest or vanity would prompt, if he deserts the weak to go to the
stronger side, the change is a suspicious one! and we shall have a right
to impute it rather to a defect of moral principle than to an accession
of intellectual strength. Again, no man, be he who he may, has a right
to change his opinion, and to be violent on opposite sides of a
question. For the only excuse for dogmatical intolerance is, that the
person who holds an opinion is totally blinded by habit to all
objections against it, so that he can see nothing wrong on his own side,
and nothing right on the other; which cannot be the case with any person
who has been sincere in the opposite opinion. No one, therefore, has a
right to call another ‘the greatest of scoundrels’ for holding the
opinions which he himself once held, without first formally
acknowledging that he himself was the greatest of hypocrites when he
maintained those opinions. When Mr. Southey subscribes to these
conditions, we will give him a license to rail on whom and as long as he
pleases: but not—_till then_! Apostates are violent in their opinions,
because they suspect their truth, even when they are most sincere: they
are forward to vilify the motives of those who differ from them, because
their own are more than suspected by the world! We proceed to notice the
flabby defence of ‘the _Wat Tyler_,’ from the well-known pen of Mr.
Coleridge, which, as far as we can understand it, proceeds upon the
following assumptions:—
1. _That Mr. Southey was only 19 when he wrote it, and had forgotten,
from that time to this, all the principles and sentiments contained in
it._
_Answer._ A person who forgets all the sentiments and principles to
which he was most attached at nineteen, can have no sentiments ever
after worth being attached to. Further, it is not true that Mr. Southey
gave up the general principles of _Wat Tyler_, which he wrote at
nineteen, till almost as many years after. He did not give them up till
many years after he had received his Irish pension in 1800. He did not
give them up till with this _leaning_ to something beyond ‘the slides of
his magic lanthorn,’ and ‘the pleasing fervour of his imagination,’ he
was canted out of them by the misty metaphysics of Mr. Coleridge, Mr.
Southey being no conjurer in such matters, and Mr. Coleridge being a
great quack. The dates of his works will shew this: as it was indeed
excellently well shewn in _The Morning Chronicle_ the other day. His
Joan of Arc, his Sonnets and Inscriptions, his Letters from Spain and
Portugal, his Annual Anthology, in which was published Mr. Coleridge’s
‘Fire, Famine, and Slaughter,’ are a series of invectives against Kings,
Priests, and Nobles, in favour of the French Revolution, and against war
and taxes up to the year 1803. Why does he not get an injunction against
all these? To set aside all Mr. Southey’s jacobin publications, it would
be necessary to erect a new court of Chancery. Mr. Coleridge’s
insinuation, that he had changed all his opinions the year after, when
Mr. S. and Mr. C., in conjunction, wrote the Fall of Robespierre, is,
therefore, not true. But Mr. Coleridge never troubles himself about
facts or dates; he is only ‘watching the slides of his magic lanthorn,’
and indulging in ‘the pleasing fervour of poetical inspiration.’
2. _That Mr. Southey was a mere boy when he wrote Wat Tyler, and
entertained Jacobin opinions: that being a child, he felt as a child,
and thought slavery, superstition, war, famine, bloodshed, taxes,
bribery and corruption, rotten boroughs, places, and pensions, shocking
things; but that now he is become a man, he has put away childish
things, and thinks there is nothing so delightful as slavery,
superstition, war, famine, bloodshed, taxes, bribery and corruption,
rotten boroughs, places and pensions, and particularly, his own._
_Answer._ Yet Mr. Coleridge tells us that when he wrote _Wat Tyler_, he
was a man of genius and learning. That Mr. Southey was a wise man when
he wrote this poem, we do not pretend: that he has ever been so, is more
than we know. This we do know, and it is worth attending to; that all
that Mr. Southey has done best in poetry, he did before he changed his
political creed; that _all_ that Mr. Coleridge ever did in poetry, as
the _Ancient Mariner_, _Christabel_, the _Three Graves_, his Poems and
his Tragedy, he had written, when, according to his own account, he must
have been a very ignorant, idle, thoughtless person; that much the
greater part of what Mr. Wordsworth has done best in poetry was done
about the same period; and if what these persons have done in poetry, in
indulging the ‘pleasing fervour of a lively imagination,’ gives no
weight to their political opinions at the time they did it, what they
have done since in science or philosophy to establish their authority,
is more than we know. All the authority that they have as poets and men
of genius must be thrown into the scale of Revolution and Reform. Their
Jacobin principles indeed gave rise to their Jacobin poetry. Since they
gave up the first, their poetical powers have flagged, and been
comparatively or wholly ‘in a state of suspended animation.’ Their
genius, their style, their versification, every thing down to their
spelling, was revolutionary. Their poetical innovations unhappily did
not answer any more than the French Revolution. As their ambition was
baulked in this first favourite direction, it was necessary for these
restless persons to do something to get into notice; as they could not
change their style, they changed their principles; and instead of
writing popular poetry, fell to scribbling venal prose.—Mr. Southey’s
opinion, like Mr. Wordsworth’s or Mr. Coleridge’s, is of no value,
except as it is his own, the unbiassed, undepraved dictate of his own
understanding and feelings; not as it is a wretched, canting, reluctant
echo of the opinion of the world. Poet-laureates are courtiers by
profession; but we say that poets are naturally Jacobins. All the poets
of the present day have been so, with a single exception, which it would
be invidious to mention. If they have not all continued so, this only
shews the instability of their own characters, and that their natural
generosity and romantic enthusiasm, ‘their lofty, imaginative, and
innocent spirits,’ have not been proof against the incessant, unwearied
importunities of vulgar ambition. The poets, we say then, are with us,
while they are worth keeping. We take the sound part of their heads and
hearts, and make Mr. Croker and the _Courier_ a present of the rest.
What the philosophers are, let the dreaded name of _modern philosophy_
answer!
3. _Mr. Coleridge compares us to the long-eared virtuoso, the ass, that
found Apollo’s lute, ‘left behind by him when he ascended to his own
natural place, to sit thenceforward with all the Muses around him,
instead of the ragged cattle of Admetus.’_
_Answer._ Now it seems that Mr. Coleridge and other common friends of
his, such as the author of the Fall of Robespierre and of Democratic
Lectures, or Lectures on Democracy, in the year 1794, knew a good deal
of Mr. Southey before he dropped this lute. Were they the ragged cattle
of Admetus that Mr. Southey was fain to associate with during his
obscure metamorphosis and strange Jacobin disguise? Did the Coleridges,
the Wordsworths, the Lloyds and Lambs and Co. precede the Hunts, the
Hazlitts, and the Cobbetts, in listening to Mr. Southey ‘tuning his
mystic harp to praise Lepaux,’ the Parisian Theophilanthropist? And is
it only since Mr. Southey has sat ‘quiring to the young-eyed cherubim,’
with the Barrymores, the Crokers, the Giffords, and the Stroehlings,
that his natural genius and moral purity of sentiment have found their
proper level and reward? Be this as it may, we plead guilty to the
charge of some little indiscreet admiration of the Apollo of Jacobinism.
We did not however find his lute three and twenty years after he had
dropped it ‘in a thistle.’ We saw it in his hands. We heard him with our
own ears play upon it, loud and long; and we can swear he was as well
satisfied with his own music as we could be. ‘_Asinos asinina
decent_,’—a bad compliment, in the style of _Dogberry_, which Mr. C.
pays to his friend and to himself, as one of his early ragged auditors.
Now whether Mr. Southey has since that period ascended to heaven or
descended to the earth, we shall leave it to Mr. Coleridge himself to
decide. For he says, that at the time when the present poet-laureate
wrote _Wat Tyler_, he (Mr. Southey) was ‘a young man full of glorious
visions concerning the possibilities of human nature, because his lofty,
imaginative, and innocent spirit, had mistaken its own virtues and
powers for the average character of mankind.’—Since Mr. Southey went to
court, he has changed his tone. _Asinos asinina decent._ Is that Mr.
Coleridge’s political logic?[35]
4. _That Mr. Southey did not express his real opinions, even at that
time, in Wat Tyler, which is a dramatic poem, in which mob-orators and
rioters figure, with appropriate sentiments, as Jack Cade may do in
Shakespear._
_Answer._ This allusion to the dramatic characters of Shakespear is
certainly unfortunate, and Mr. Coleridge himself hints as much. Rioters
and mob-preachers are not the only persons who appear in ‘the _Wat
Tyler_.’ The King and the Archbishop come forward in their own persons,
according to Mr. Coleridge, with appropriate sentiments, labelled and
put into their mouths. For example:—
_Philpot._ Every moment brings
Fresh tidings of our peril.
_King._ It were well
To yield them what they ask.
_Archbishop._ Aye, that my liege
Were politic. Go boldly forth to meet them,
Grant all they ask—however wild and ruinous;—
Meantime, the troops you have already summoned
Will gather round them. Then my Christian power
Absolves you of your promise.
_Walworth._ Were but their ringleaders cut off, the rabble
Would soon disperse.
The very burden of _The Courier_ all last week, and for many weeks last
past and to come.
5. Mr. Coleridge sums up his opinion of the ultimate design and secret
origin of ‘the _Wat Tyler_’ in these remarkable words:—‘We should have
seen that the vivid, yet indistinct images in which he had painted the
evils of war and the hardships of the poor, proved that neither the
forms nor the feelings were the result of real observation. The product
of the poet’s own fancy, they’—[_viz._ the evils of war and the
hardships of the poor]—‘were impregnated, therefore, with _that
pleasurable fervour which is experienced in all energetic exertion of
intellectual power_. But as to any serious wish, akin to reality,’ [that
is, to remove these evils] ‘as to any real persons or events designed or
expected, we should think it just as wise and just as charitable, to
believe that Quevedo or Dante would have been glad to realise the horrid
phantoms and torments of _imaginary_ oppressors, whom they beheld in the
infernal regions—_i.e._ on the slides of their own magic lanthorn.’
_Answer._ The slides of the guillotine, excited (as we have been told)
the same pleasurable fervour in Mr. Southey’s mind: and Mr. Coleridge
seems to insinuate, that the 5,800,000 lives which have been lost to
prove mankind the property of kings, by divine right, have been lost ‘on
the slides of a magic lanthorn’; the evils of war, like all other actual
evils, being ‘the products of a fervid imagination.’ So much for the
sincerity of poetry.
_Audrey._ Is not poetry a true thing?
_Touchstone._ No.
Would these gentlemen persuade us that there is nothing evil in the
universe but what exists in their imagination, but what is the product
of their fervid fancy? That the world is full of nothing but their
egotism, their vanity, and their hypocrisy? The world is _sick_ of them,
their egotism, their vanity, and their hypocrisy.
6th and lastly. ‘Mr. Southey’s darling poet from his childhood was
Edmund Spenser, from whom, next to the spotless purity of his own moral
habits, he learned that reverence for
—— ——“constant chastity,
Unspotted faith, and comely womanhood,
Regard of honour and mild modesty.”
‘And we are strongly persuaded that the indignation which, in his early
perusal of our history, the outrage on _Wat Tyler’s_ Daughter had
kindled within him, was the circumstance that recommended the story to
his choice for the first powerful exercise of his dramatic powers. It is
this, too, we doubt not, that coloured and shaped his feelings during
the whole composition of the drama.
“Through the allegiance and just fealty
Which he did owe unto all womankind.”’
Mr. Coleridge might as well tell us that the Laureate wrote _Wat Tyler_
as an Epithalamium on his own marriage. There is but one line on the
subject from the beginning to the end. No; it is not Mr. Southey’s way
to say nothing on the subject on which he writes. If this were the main
drift and secret spring of the poem, why does Mr. Southey wish to
retract it now? Has he been taught by his present fashionable associates
to laugh at Edmund Spenser, the darling of the _boy_ Southey, to abjure
‘his allegiance and just fealty to all womankind,’ and to look upon
‘rapes and ravishments’ as ‘exaggerated evils,’ the product of an idle
imagination, exciting a pleasurable fervour at the time, and signifying
nothing afterwards? Is the outrage upon _Wat Tyler’s_ Daughter the only
evil in history, or in the poem itself, which ought to inflame the
virtuous indignation of the full-grown stripling bard? Are all the other
oppressions recorded in the annals of the world nothing but ‘horrible
shadows, unreal mockeries,’ that this alone should live ‘within the book
and volume of his brain unmixed with baser matter’? Or has Mr. Southey,
the historian and the politician, at last discovered, that even this
evil, the greatest and the only evil in the world, and not a mere
illusion of his boyish imagination, is itself a bagatelle, compared with
the blessings of the poll-tax, feudal vassalage, popery, and slavery,
the attempt to put down which by murder, insurrection, and treason, in
the reign of Richard II. the poet-laureate once celebrated _con amore_
in ‘the _Wat Tyler_‘?—In courtly malice and servility Mr. Southey has
outdone Herodias’s daughter. He marches into Chancery ‘with his own head
in a charger,’ as an offering to Royal delicacy. He plucks out the heart
of Liberty within him, and mangles his own breast to stifle every
natural sentiment left there: and yet Mr. Coleridge would persuade us
that this stuffed figure, this wretched phantom, is the living man. The
finery of birth-day suits has dazzled his senses, so that he has ‘no
speculation in those eyes that he does glare with’; yet Mr. Coleridge
would persuade us that this is the clear-sighted politician. Famine
stares him in the face, and he looks upon her with lack-lustre eye.
Despotism hovers over him, and he says, ‘Come, let me clutch thee.’ He
drinks the cup of human misery, and thinks it is a cup of sack. He has
no feeling left, but of ‘tickling commodity’; no ears but for court
whispers; no understanding but of his interest; no passion but his
vanity. And yet they would persuade us that this non-entity is
somebody—‘the chief dread of Jacobins and Jacobinism, or quacks and
quackery.’ If so, Jacobins and Jacobinism have not much to fear; and Mr.
Coleridge may publish as many Lay Sermons as he pleases.
There is but one statement in the article in _The Courier_ to which we
can heartily assent; it is Mr. Southey’s prediction of the fate of the
French Revolution. ‘The Temple of Despotism,’ he said, ‘would be
rebuilt, like that of the Mexican God, with human skulls, and cemented
with human blood.’ He has lived to see this; to assist in the
accomplishment of his prophecy, and to consecrate the spectre-building
with pensioned hands!
A LETTER TO WILLIAM SMITH, ESQ., M.P. _from_ Robert Southey, _Esq._ John
Murray, Albemarle-street. 1817. _Price_ 2_s._
_May 4, 1817._
This is very unlike Mr. Burke’s celebrated ‘Letter to the Duke of
Bedford.’ The last is the only work of the Irish orator and patriot, in
which he was in earnest, and all that he wanted was sincerity. The
attack made upon his pension, by rousing his self-love, kindled his
imagination, and made him blaze out in a torrent of fiery eloquence, in
the course of which his tilting prose-Pegasus darted upon the titles of
the noble duke like a thunderbolt, reversed his ancestral honours,
overturned the monstrous straddle-legged figure of that legitimate
monarch, Henry VIII., exploded the mines of the French revolution,
kicked down the Abbé Sieyes’s pigeon-holes full of constitutions, and
only reposed from his whirling career, in that fine retrospect on
himself, and the affecting episode to Admiral Keppel. Mr. Burke was an
apostate, ‘a malignant renegado,’ like Mr. Southey; but there the
comparison ends. He would not have been content, on such an occasion as
the present, with _Mistering_ his opponent, and _Esquiring_ himself,
like the ladies in the Beggar’s Opera, who express the height of their
rankling envy and dislike, by calling each other—_Madam_. Mr. Southey’s
self-love, when challenged to the lists, does not launch out into the
wide field of wit or argument: it retires into its own littleness,
collects all its slender resources in one poor effort of pert,
pettifogging spite, makes up by studied malice for conscious impotence,
and attempts to mortify others by the angry sense of his own
insignificance. He grows tenacious of his ridiculous pretensions, in
proportion as they are given up by every body else. His self-complacency
riots, with a peculiar and pointed gusto, in the universal contempt or
compassion of friends and foes. In the last stage of a galloping
consumption, while the last expiring puff of _The Courier_ makes ‘a
swan-like end,’ in a compliment to his opponents, he is sanguine of a
deathless reputation—considers his soreness to the least touch as a
proof of his being in a whole skin, and his uneasiness to repel every
attack as a proof of his being invulnerable. In a word, he mistakes an
excess of spleen and irritability for the consciousness of innocence,
and sets up his own egotism, vanity, ill-humour, and intolerance, as an
answer in full to all the objections which have been brought against him
of vanity, egotism, malignity, and intolerance. His ‘Letter’ is a
concentrated essence of a want of self-knowledge. It is the picture of
the author’s mind in little. In this respect, it is ‘a psychological
curiosity’; a study of human infirmity. As some persons bequeath their
bodies to the surgeons to be dissected after their death, Mr. Southey
publicly exposes his mind to be anatomized while he is living. He lays
open his character to the scalping-knife, guides the philosophic hand in
its painful researches, and on the bald crown of our _petit tondu_, in
vain concealed under withered bay-leaves and a few contemptible grey
hairs, you see the organ of vanity triumphant—sleek, smooth, round,
perfect, polished, horned, and shining, as it were in a transparency.
This is the handle of his intellect, the index of his mind; ‘the guide,
the anchor of his purest thoughts, and soul of all his moral being’; the
clue to the labyrinth of all his tergiversations and contradictions; the
_medius terminus_ of his political logic.
—— ——‘The ruling passion once express’d,
Wharton is plain, and Chartres stands confess’d.’
Once admit that Mr. Southey is always in the right, and every one else
in the wrong, and all the rest follows. This at once reconciles ‘Wat
Tyler’ and the ‘Quarterly Review,’ which Mr. William Smith took down to
the House, in two different pockets for fear of a breach of the peace;
identifies the poet of the ‘Joan of Arc’ and of the ‘Annual Anthology’
with the poet-laureate; and _jumps_ the stripling into the man, whenever
the latter has a mind to jump into a place or pension. Till you can
deprive him of his personal identity, he will always be the same
infallible person—in his own opinion. He is both judge and jury in his
own cause; the sole standard of right and wrong. To differ with him is
inexcusable; for ‘there is but one perfect, even himself.’ He is the
central point of all moral and intellectual excellence; the way, the
truth, and the life. There is no salvation out of his pale; and yet he
makes the terms of communion so strict, that there is no hope that way.
The crime of Mr. William Smith and others, against whom this high-priest
of impertinence levels his anathemas, is _in not being_ Mr. Southey.
What is right in him, is wrong in them; what is the height of folly or
wickedness in them, is, ‘as fortune and the flesh shall serve,’ the
height of wisdom and virtue in him; for there is no medium in his
reprobation of others and approbation of himself. Whatever he does, is
proper: whatever he thinks, is true and profound: ‘I, Robert Shallow,
Esquire, have said it.’ Whether Jacobin or Anti-jacobin,
Theophilanthropist or Trinitarian, Spencean, or Ex-Spencean, the patron
of Universal Suffrage or of close Boroughs, of the reversion of sinecure
places, and pensions, or of the abolition of all property,—however
extreme in one opinion or another, he alone is in the right; and those
who do not think as he does, and change their opinions as he does, and
go the lengths that he does, first on one side and then on the other,
are necessarily knaves and fools. Wherever he sits, is the head of the
table. Truth and justice are always at his side. The wise and virtuous
are always with him. How should it be otherwise? He calls those ‘wise
and virtuous’ who are of his way of thinking; the rest are ‘sciolists,
profligates, and coxcombs.’ By a fiction of his own making, not by a
fiction of the law, Mr. Southey can do no wrong; and to accuse him of
it, is a libel on the face of it, and little short of high treason. It
is not the poet-laureate, the author of ‘Wat Tyler’ and of the
‘Quarterly Review,’ who is to blame for his violence and apostacy; with
that portion of self-sufficiency which this author possesses, ‘these are
most virtuous’; but it is the person who brings forward the
contradictions and intemperance of these two performances who is never
to be forgiven for questioning Mr. Southey’s consistency and moderation.
All this is strange, but not new to our readers. We have said it all
before. Why does Mr. Southey oblige us to repeat the accusation, by
furnishing us with fresh proofs of it? He is betrayed to his ruin by
trusting to the dictates of his personal feelings and wounded pride; and
yet he dare not look at his situation through any other medium. ‘To know
my deed, ‘t were best not know myself.’ But does he expect all eyes as
well as his to be ‘blind with the pin and web’? Does he pull his
laurel-crown as a splendid film over his eyes, and expect us to join in
a game of political blindman’s-buff with him, with a ‘Hoop, do me no
harm, good man’? Are we not to cry out while an impudent, hypocritical,
malignant renegado is putting his gag in our mouths, and getting his
thumb-screws ready? ‘Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there
shall be no more cakes and ale,’ says _Sir Toby_ to the fantastical
steward _Malvolio_? Does Mr. Southey think, because he is a pensioner,
that he is to make us willing slaves? While he goes on writing in the
‘Quarterly,’ shall we give over writing in _The Examiner_? Before he
puts down the liberty of the press, the press shall put him down, with
all his hireling and changeling crew. In the _servile war_ which Mr.
Southey tells us is approaching, the service we have proposed to
ourselves to do is, to neutralize the servile intellect of the country.
This we have already done in part, and hope to make clear work of it,
before we have done.—For example:
This heroic epistle to William Smith, Esq. from Robert Southey, sets off
in the following manner:—
‘SIR,—You are represented in the newspapers as having entered, during an
important discussion in parliament, into a comparison between certain
passages in the ‘Quarterly Review,’ and the opinions which were held by
the author of ‘Wat Tyler’ three-and-twenty years ago. It appears
farther, according to the same authority, that the introduction of so
strange a criticism, in so strange a place, did not arise from the
debate, but was a premeditated thing; that you had prepared yourself for
it, by stowing the ‘Quarterly Review’ in one pocket, and ‘Wat Tyler’ in
the other; and that you deliberately stood up for the purpose of
reviling an individual who was not present to vindicate himself, and in
a place which afforded you protection.’ p. 2.
So that for Mr. William Smith in a debate on a bill _for the suppression
of all political opinions_ (as we are told by Mr. Alderman Smith, a very
different person, to be sure, and according to Mr. Southey, no doubt, a
highly respectable character, and a true lover of liberty and the
constitution) for Mr. William Smith on such an occasion to introduce the
sentiments of a well-known writer in a public journal, that writer being
a whiffling tool of the court, and that journal the avowed organ of the
government-party, in confirmation of his apprehensions of the objects
and probable results of the bill then pending, was quite irrelevant and
unparliamentary; nor had Mr. William Smith any right to set an
additional stigma on the unprincipled and barefaced lengths which this
writer now goes in servility and intolerance, by shewing the equal
lengths to which he went formerly in popular fanaticism and
licentiousness. Yet neither Mr. Southey nor his friend Mr. Wynne
complained of Mr. Canning’s want of regularity, or disrespect of the
House, in lugging out of his pocket THE SPENCEAN PLAN as an argument
against Reform, and as decisive of the views of the Friends of Reform in
parliament. Nay, Mr. Southey requoted Mr. Canning’s quotation, for the
purpose of reviling all Reform and all Reformers, in the ‘Quarterly
Review’;—a place in which any one so reviled can no more defend himself
than Mr. Southey can defend himself in parliament; and which it seems
affords equal ‘protection’ to those who avail themselves of it; for a
Quarterly Reviewer, according to Mr. Southey, being anonymous, is not at
all accountable for what he writes. He says,—
‘As to the “Quarterly Review,” you can have no other authority for
ascribing any particular paper in that journal to one person or to
another, than common report. The “Quarterly Review” stands upon its own
merits.’ [Yet it was for what Mr. Southey wrote in that Review, that
_The Courier_ told us at the time that Mr. Southey was made
Poet-laureate.] ‘What I may have said or thought in any part of my life,
no more concerns that journal than it does you or the House of Commons.’
[What Mr. Southey has said publicly any where in any part of his life,
concerns the public and every man in it, unless Mr. Southey means to say
that his opinions are utterly worthless and contemptible, a piece of
modesty of which we cannot suspect him.] ‘What I have written in it is a
question which you, Sir, have no right to ask, and which certainly I
will not answer. As little right have you to take that for granted which
you cannot possibly know.’ Now mark. In the very paragraph before the
one in which he skulks from the responsibility of the ‘Quarterly
Review,’ and with pert vapid assurance repels every insinuation implying
a breach of his inviolability as an anonymous writer, he makes an
impudent, unqualified, and virulent attack on Mr. Brougham as an
Edinburgh Reviewer, ‘This was not necessary in regard to Mr.
Brougham ... _he only carried the quarrels as well as the practices of
the Edinburgh Review into the House of Commons. But as calumny, Sir, has
not been your vocation_, it may be useful, even to yourself, if I
comment upon your first attempt.’—p. 3. Such a want of common logic is
to our literal capacities quite inexplicable: it is ‘in the third tier
of wonders above wonders.’
In page 5, Mr. Southey calls the person who published ‘Wat Tyler’ ‘a
skulking scoundrel,’ with his characteristic delicacy and moderation in
the use of epithets; and says that it was published, ‘for the avowed
purpose of insulting him, and with the hope of injuring him if
possible.’ Perhaps one object was to prevent Mr. Southey from insulting
and injuring other people. It was supposed that ‘Wat Tyler’ might prove
an antidote to the ‘Quarterly Review’: that, ‘the healing might come
from the same weapon that gave the wound’; and in this instance it has
turned out so. He adds, ‘You knew that the transaction bore upon its
face every character of baseness and malignity. You knew that it must
have been effected either by robbery, or by breach of trust. _These
things, Mr. William Smith, you knew!_’ [Mr. Southey at least knows no
such thing, but he is here in his glory; putting a false statement into
epigrammatic phraseology; bristling with horror at antithetical
enormities of his own fabricating, and concluding with that formidable
and significant repetition of the title, Christian and surname of _Mr.
William Smith_.] The above paragraph concludes thus, with the author’s
usual logical precision and personal modesty. ‘And knowing them as you
did, I verily believe, that if it were possible to revoke what is
irrevocable, you would _at this moment_ be far more desirous of blotting
from remembrance the _disgraceful_ speech which stands upon record in
your name, than I should be of cancelling the boyish composition which
gave rise to it. “Wat Tyler” is full of errors ... but they are the
errors of youth and ignorance; they bear no indication of an ungenerous
spirit, or of a malevolent heart.’ p. 6. It seems by this passage that
any attempt to fix disgrace on Mr. Southey only, recoils upon the head
of his accuser. ‘Upon his brow shame is ashamed to sit.’ He says that
Mr. W. Smith’s _disgraceful_ speech was occasioned by ‘Wat Tyler.’ That
is not true. It was occasioned by ‘Wat Tyler’ coupled with the
‘Quarterly Review.’ He says, ‘“Wat Tyler” is full of errors.’ So is the
article in the ‘Quarterly Review’; but _they_ are not ‘the errors of
youth and ignorance; they bear strong indications of an ungenerous
spirit and a malignant heart.’ Let not Mr. Southey mistake. It is not
the indiscreet and romantic extravagance of the boy which has brought
the man into this predicament: it is the deliberate and rancorous
servility of the man that has made those who were the marks of his
slanderous and cowardly invectives, rake up the errors of his youth
against him.
Mr. Southey next proceeds to a defence of himself for writing ‘the Wat
Tyler.’ He argues that ‘it is not _seditious_, because it is
_dramatic_.’ We deny that it is dramatic. He acknowledges that it is
mischievous, and particularly so, at the present time. To the last part
of the proposition we cannot assent. When this poem was written, there
was a rage of speculation which might be dangerous: the danger at
present arises from the rage of hunger. And the true reason why Mr.
Southey was eager to suppress this publication was not what he pretends,
a fear that it might inculcate notions of perfect equality and general
licentiousness: but a feeling that it might prevent him from defending
every abuse of excessive inequality, and every stretch of arbitrary
power, the end of which must be to sink ‘the people’ in an abyss of
slavery, and to plunge ‘the populace’ in the depths of famine, despair,
and misery, or by a sudden and tremendous revulsion, to occasion all
that confusion, anarchy, violence, and bloodshed, which Mr. Southey
hypocritically affects to deprecate as the consequences of seditious and
inflammatory publications. Now we contend in opposition to Mr. Southey
and all that servile crew, that the only possible preventive of one or
other of these impending evils, namely, lasting slavery, famine, and
general misery on the one hand, or a sudden and dreadful convulsion on
the other, is the liberty of the press, which Mr. Southey calls
sedition, and the firm, manly, and independent expression of public
opinion, which he calls rebellion. We detest despotism: we deprecate
popular commotion: but if we are forced upon an alternative, we have a
choice: we prefer temporary to lasting evils. Mr. Southey has indeed a
new-acquired and therefore lively dread of the horrors of revolution.
But his passion for despotism is greater than his dread of anarchy; and
he runs all the risks of the one, rather than not glut his insatiable
and unnatural appetite for the other. Such are his politics, and such
are ours. He says, ‘The piece was written under the influence of
opinions which I have long since outgrown, and repeatedly disclaimed,
but for which I have never felt either shame or contrition. They were
taken up conscientiously in early youth, they were acted upon in
disregard of all worldly considerations, _and they were left behind in
the same strait-forward_ _course, as I advanced in years_.’ The latter
part of this statement is not self-evident. Mr. Southey says that while
he adhered to his first principles, he acted with a total disregard of
his worldly interest; and this is easily understood:—but that his
desertion of those principles, so contrary to his worldly views, was
equally independent, disinterested and free from sinister motives, is
not so plain. Nor can we take Mr. Southey’s word for it. And we will
tell him the reason. If he had been _progressive_, as he calls it, in
his course, up to the year 1814, we should not have found much fault
with him: but why did he become stationary then? Has nothing happened in
the three last years,—nothing—to make Mr. Southey retreat back to some
of his old opinions, as he had advanced from them, guided, as he
professes to be in his undeviating course, by facts and experience? Are
the actual events of the last three years nothing in the scale of Mr.
Southey’s judgment? Is not their weight overpowering, irresistible?
What, do not the names of Poland, Norway, Finland, Saxony, Italy, Spain
and Portugal, the Pope, the Inquisition, and the Cortes (to say nothing
of France, Nismes, and the Bourbons) thrown into the scale of common
sense and common honesty, dash it down, with a startling sound, upon the
counter, where Mr. Southey is reckoning his well-gotten gains, the price
of his disinterested exertions in the cause of Spanish liberty and the
deliverance of mankind, making his hair stand on end at his own folly
and credulity, and forcing him indignantly to fling his last year’s
pension and the arrears of the Quarterly in the face of Mr. Murray’s
shopmen and the clerks of the Treasury, and swear, ‘in disregard of all
worldly considerations,’ never to set his foot in Downing or
Albemarle-street again? No such thing. In advocating the cause of the
French people, Mr. Southey’s principles and his interest were at
variance, and therefore he quitted his principles when he saw a good
opportunity: in taking up the cause of the Allies, his principles and
his interest became united and thenceforth indissoluble. His engagement
to his first love, the Republic, was only upon liking; his marriage to
Legitimacy is _for better, for worse_, and nothing but death shall part
them. Our simple Laureate was sharp upon his hoyden Jacobin mistress,
who brought him no dowry, neither place nor pension, who ‘found him poor
and kept him so,’ by her prudish notions of virtue. He divorced her, in
short, for nothing but the spirit and success with which she resisted
the fraud and force to which the old bawd Legitimacy was forever
resorting to overpower her resolution and fidelity. He said she was a
virago, a cunning gipsey, always in broils about her honour and the
inviolability of her person, and always getting the better in them,
furiously scratching the face or cruelly tearing off the hair of the
said pimping old lady, who would never let her alone, night or day. But
since her foot slipped one day on the ice, and the detestable old hag
tripped up her heels, and gave her up to the kind keeping of the Allied
Sovereigns, Mr. Southey has devoted himself to her more fortunate and
wealthy rival: he is become uxorious in his second matrimonial
connexion; and though his false Duessa has turned out a very witch, a
foul, ugly witch, drunk with insolence, mad with power, a griping,
rapacious wretch, bloody, luxurious, wanton, malicious, not sparing
steel, or poison, or gold, to gain her ends—bringing famine, pestilence,
and death in her train—infecting the air with her thoughts, killing the
beholders with her looks, claiming mankind as her property, and using
them as her slaves—driving every thing before her, and playing the devil
wherever she comes, Mr. Southey sticks to her in spite of every thing,
and for very shame lays his head in her lap, paddles with the palms of
her hands, inhales her hateful breath, leers in her eyes and whispers in
her ears, calls her little fondling names, Religion, Morality, and
Social Order, takes for his motto,
‘Be to her faults a little blind,
Be to her virtues very kind’—
sticks close to his filthy bargain, and will not give her up, because
she keeps him, and he is down in her will. Faugh!
‘What’s here?
Gold! yellow, glittering, precious gold!
—— —— ——The wappened widow,
Whom the spittle-house and ulcerous sores
Would heave the gorge at, this embalms and spices
To the April day again.’
The above passage is, we fear, written in the style of Aretin, which Mr.
Southey condemns in the _Quarterly_. It is at least a very sincere
style: Mr. Southey will never write so, till he can keep in the same
mind for three and twenty years together. Why should not one make a
sentence of a page long, out of the feelings of one’s whole life? The
early Protestant Divines wrote such prodigious long sentences from the
sincerity of their religious and political opinions. Mr. Coleridge ought
not to imitate them.
A LETTER TO WILLIAM SMITH, ESQ. M.P. _from_ Robert Southey, _Esq._ John
Murray, Albemarle-street. 1817. _Price_ 2_s._
‘What word hath passed thy lips, Adam severe?’
_May 11, 1817._
Has Mr. Murray turned Quaker, that he styles himself John Murray (‘Mark
you his absolute John?‘) in the title-page? Or has Mr. Southey resigned
his place and his pretensions, that he omits in the same page his
honorary titles of Poet-Laureate and Member of the Royal Spanish
Academy? We cannot tell; but we should think it some sign of grace, if,
without a hint from the Lord Chamberlain, he had for a while laid by his
tattered laurel and spattered birth-day suit: if, as the Commander in
Chief retired after the droll affair of Mrs. Clarke (we are not such
rigid moralists as Mr. Southey) the Poet-Laureate had thought proper to
veil his blushing court favours during the dramatic representation of
_Wat Tyler_, and did not consider it either prudent or becoming to be
seen going to or coming from Carlton-house with the mob, ‘the reading
rabble,’ at his heels, and with a shower of twopenny pamphlets sticking
to the skirts of his turned coat. Poor _Morgan_, the honest Welchman in
_Roderic Random_, reeking with the fumes of tobacco and garlic, was not
more offensive to the sensitive organs of _Captain Whiffle_, than Mr.
Southey must be to the nice feelings of an exalted Personage, reeking
with the fumes of Jacobinism, and rolled, as he has been, in the kennel
of the newspaper press. A voyage to Italy, a classical quarantine of a
year or two, with the Pope’s blessing, seems absolutely necessary to
wipe out the stains of his _Wat Tyler_, ‘as pure as sin with baptism’;
and to restore him to the vows of Prince and People as smug as a young
novice in a monastery, and sweet as any waiting-gentlewoman.
Mr. Southey says, in continuation of his Defence of _Wat Tyler_, p. 7,
‘It was written when republicanism was confined to a very small number
of the educated classes:’ [Is it more common now among the intended
hearers of Mr. Coleridge’s Second and Third Lay-Sermons?]—‘when those
who were known to entertain such opinions were exposed to personal
danger from _the populace_‘; [The populace of course were not set on by
the higher classes, the clergy or gentry, nor can Mr. S. mean to include
the Attorney-General of that day, my Lord Eldon, as one of _the
populace_.] ‘And when a spirit of anti-jacobinism was predominant, which
I cannot characterise more truly than by saying that it was as unjust
and intolerant, though not quite as ferocious, _as the Jacobinism of the
present day_.’—Why not the _anti-jacobinism_ of the present day? ‘The
collusion holds in the exchange.’ The business is carried on to the
present hour; and though it has changed hands, the principal of the firm
is still the same. Mr. Gifford, the present Editor of the _Quarterly
Review_, where Mr. Southey now writes, was formerly the Editor of the
_Anti-Jacobin_ newspaper, where he was written at. The above passage is
however a sly passing hit at Mr. Canning’s parodies, who (shame to say
it) was as wise and as witty three and twenty years ago as he is now,
and has not been making that progressive improvement ever since, on
which Mr. Southey compliments himself, congratulates his friends, and
insults over his enemies! How nicely this gentleman _differences_
himself from all his contemporaries, Jacobin or anti-Jacobin! No one can
come up to him at all points. ‘The lovely Marcia towers above her sex!’
The Letter-writer goes on to say:—‘When therefore Mr. Smith informed the
House of Commons that the author of _Wat Tyler_ thinks no longer upon
certain points as he did in his youth, he informed that legislative
assembly of nothing more than what the author has shown during very many
years, _in the course of his writings_ ... that while events have been
moving on upon the great theatre of human affairs, _his intellect has
not been stationary_.’—[Mr. S. here confounds a change of opinions with
the progress of intellect, a mistake which we shall correct
presently.]—‘But when the Member for Norwich asserts that I impute evil
motives to men merely for holding the same doctrines’ [No, only a tenth
part of the same doctrines] ‘which I myself formerly professed, and when
he charges me with the malignity and baseness of a Renegade, the
assertion and the charge are as false, as the language in which they are
conveyed is coarse and insulting.’ p. 9.
Now we know of no writings of Mr. Southey’s, in the course of which he
had shewn for many years the change or progress of his opinions, but in
the _Quarterly Review_ and other anonymous publications. We suppose he
will hardly say that his Birth-day Odes, the _Carmen Nuptiale_, &c. have
shewn the progress of his intellect. But in the same anonymous writings,
in which the public would find, to Mr. Southey’s credit, that his
intellect had not been stationary, the Member for Norwich would find
what was not so much to his credit, but all that was wanting to make
good the charge—that Mr. Southey’s moderation and charity to those whose
intellects had been stationary, did not keep pace with the progress of
his own—for in the articles in the _Quarterly_, which he claims or
disclaims as he pleases, he, the writer of the Inscription on Old Sarum,
describes ‘a Reformer as no better than a housebreaker’: he, the writer
of the Inscription at Chepstow Castle, calls all those who do not bow
their necks to the doctrine of Divine Right, Rebels and Regicides: he,
the author of _Wat Tyler_, calls those persons who think taxes, wars,
the wanton waste of the resources of a country, and the unfeeling
profligacy of the rich, likely to aggravate and rouse to madness the
intolerable sufferings of the poor, ‘flagitious incendiaries, panders to
insurrection, murder, and treason, and the worst of scoundrels’; he, the
equalizer of all property and of popular representation, would protect
the holders of rotten boroughs and of entailed sinecures, by shutting up
all those who write against them in solitary confinement, without pen,
ink, or paper, to answer the unanswerable arguments of Mr. Southey—in
short, the author of the articles in the _Quarterly Review_, if he was
not always a base and malignant sycophant, shews himself to be a base
and malignant Renegade, by defending all the rotten, and undermining all
the sound parts of the system to which he professes to be a convert, and
by consigning over to a ‘vigour beyond the law’ all those who expose his
unprincipled, pragmatical tergiversations, or would maintain the system
itself, without maintaining those corruptions and abuses, which were all
that Mr. Southey at one time saw to hold up to execration in the English
Constitution, and are all that he now sees to admire and revere in it.
This is as natural in a Renegado, as it would be unaccountable in any
one else.
We must get on a little faster, for to expose the absurdities of this
Letter one by one would fill ‘a nice little book.’ In the pages
immediately following, Mr. Southey glances at the Editor of the
_Edinburgh Review_, whom he condemns ‘to bear a _gore sinister tenné_ in
his escutcheon,’ for saying that Mr. Southey does not form an exception
to the _irritabile genus vatum_. He says, that he has often refrained
from exposing the ignorance and inconsistency of his opponents, as well
as ‘that moral turpitude,’ which, our readers must by this time
perceive, can hardly fail to accompany any difference of opinion with
him. He says that ‘he has a talent for satire, but that (good soul!) he
has long since subdued the disposition.’ This must be since writing the
last _Quarterly_: we thought there were some shrewd hits there, and we
suspect Sir Richard Phillips, whom he laughs at for his dislike of war
and of animal food, for pages together, will be of our opinion. He says
that ‘he has been lately employed, while among the mountains of
Cumberland, upon the Mines of Brazil and the War in the Peninsula.’
‘Why man, he doth bestride the world
Like a Colossus, and we, petty men, peep
Under his huge legs.’
‘His _name_, in the mean time, has served in London for the very
shuttlecock of discussion.’ Why should not his name be a shuttlecock,
when he himself is no better?—‘He has impeded the rising reputation of
Toby, the Sapient Pig;’—has overlaid the posthumous birth of the young
Shiloh, and perhaps prevented Mr. Coleridge’s premature deliverance of
his last _Lay Sermon_. After all these misfortunes, the author makes
merry with Bonaparte’s ‘having been exposed, like Bishop Hatto, to be
devoured by the rats!’ The levelling rogue cares neither for Bishops nor
Emperors, but grows grave again in recounting the retrograde progress of
his own mind.
‘In my youth, when my stock of knowledge consisted of such an
acquaintance with Greek and Roman history, as is acquired in the course
of a regular scholastic education,’—[The Greek and Roman history is as
good as the history of rotten boroughs or the reign of George
III.]—‘when my heart was full of poetry and romance,—[Is it so no
longer?]—‘and Lucan and Akenside were at my tongue’s end.’—[Instead of
the red book and the court calendar]—‘_I fell into_ the political
opinions which the French Revolution was then scattering throughout
Europe:’ [We have here a pretty fair account of the origin and genealogy
of the opinions of the French Revolution, which opinions of liberty,
truth, and justice, neither the French Revolution shall destroy, nor
those who destroyed _it_, because it was produced by and gave birth to
those opinions; and does Mr. Southey suppose that the suppression of
_Wat Tyler_ is to suppress those opinions, and that a lying article in
the _Quarterly Review_ is to persuade us that they who made war on those
opinions from the beginning (and by so doing, produced all the evils of
those opinions, produced them purposely, in the malice of their hearts
and the darkness of their minds produced them to destroy all liberty,
truth, and justice, and to keep mankind their slaves in perpetuity by
right divine) were right from the beginning, that they deserved well of
mankind, that their boasted triumph, the triumph of kings over the
species, is ours and Mr. Southey’s triumph? Or would he persuade us that
the Greek and Roman History has become obsolete, because Mr. Southey
left school three and twenty years ago; that poetry and romance were
banished from the human heart when he took a place and pension; that
Lucan and Akenside will not live as long as _Wat Tyler_, or the
_Quarterly Review_!—We broke off in an interesting part. Mr. Southey
proceeds:]—‘Following those opinions with ardour wherever they led.’
[This is an old trick of the author, he is a keen sportsman;] ‘I soon
perceived that inequalities of rank were a light evil compared to the
inequalities of property,[36] and those more fearful distinctions which
the want of moral and intellectual culture occasions between man and
man. At that time, and with those opinions or rather feelings (for their
root was in the heart, and not in the understanding) I wrote _Wat Tyler_
as one who was impatient of “all the oppressions that are done under the
sun.”’ [Here we must make another full stop.] Mr. Southey is incapable
of forming any other opinions but from his feelings: he never had any
other opinions, he never will have any others, worth a rush. When the
opinions he professes ceased to be the dictates of his heart, they
became the dictates of his vanity and interest; they became good for
nothing. When the first ebullition of youthful ardour was over, his
understanding was not competent to maintain its independence against the
artifices of sophistry, aided by the accumulating force of ‘worldly
considerations,’ showy or substantial, the long neglect of which he had
felt to his cost. Mr. Southey’s pure reason was not steady enough to
contemplate the truth in an unprejudiced and unimpassioned point of
view. His imagination first ran away with his understanding; and now,
that he is getting old, his convenience, the influence of fashion, and
the tide of opinion, rush in, and fill up all the void both of sense and
imagination, driving him into the very vortex of court-sycophancy, the
sinks and common sewers of corruption. Mr. Southey is not a man to hear
reason at any time of his life. He thinks his change of opinion is owing
to an increase of knowledge, because he has in fact no idea of any
progress in intellect but exchanging one error for another. He has no
idea that a man may grow wiser in the same opinion by discovering new
reasons for the faith that is in him; for Mr. Southey has no reasons for
the faith that is in him. He does not see how a man may devote his whole
life to the discovery of the principle of the most common truth; for he
has no principles of thought, either to guide, enlarge, or modify his
knowledge. He has nothing to shew for the wisdom of his opinions but his
own opinion of their wisdom: they are mere self-opinions: he considers
his present notions as profound and solid, because his former ones were
hasty and shallow; asserts them with pert, vapid assurance, because he
does not see the objections against them; and thinks he must be right in
his premises in proportion to the violence and extravagance of his
conclusions. Because when he wrote _Wat Tyler_, he was ‘impatient of all
the oppressions that are done under the sun,’ he now thinks it his
bounden duty to justify them all, with equal impatience of
contradiction. Mr. Southey does not know himself so well as we do; and a
greater confirmation of his ignorance in this respect cannot well be
given than the rest of the above passage. ‘The subject of _Wat Tyler_
was injudiciously chosen; and it was treated as might be expected by a
youth of twenty, in such times, who regarded only one side of the
question.’ [It is Mr. Southey’s fault or his misfortune that at all
times he regards only one side of a question.]
‘There is no other misrepresentation. The sentiments of the historical
characters are correctly stated.’ [What, of the King, the Judge, and the
Archbishop?] ‘Were I now to dramatize the same story, there would be
much to add, but little to alter. I should not express those sentiments
less strongly, but I should oppose to them more enlarged views of the
nature of man and the progress of society. _I should set forth with
equal force the oppressions of the feudal system, the excesses of the
insurgents, and the treachery of the government_,’ [Doctors doubt that]
‘and hold up the errors and crimes which were then committed, as a
warning _for this_ and for future generations. I should write _as a man;
not as a stripling_; with the same heart, and the same desires, but with
a ripened understanding and competent stores of knowledge,’ p. 15. Let
him do it, but he dare not. He would shew by the attempt the hollowness
of his boasted independence, the little time-serving meanness of his
most enlarged views; in a word, that he has still the same
understanding, but no longer the same heart. What are ‘the ripened
discoveries and competent stores of knowledge’ which Mr. Southey would
bring to this task? Are they the barefaced self-evident sophistries, the
wretched shuffling evasions of common-sense and humanity which he
contributes to the _Quarterly Review_, the cast-off, thread-bare,
tattered excuses of Paley’s Moral Philosophy, and Windham’s hashed-up
speeches? Why, all the prodigious discoveries which Mr. Southey there
details with such dry significance, are familiar to every school-boy,
are the common stock in trade of every spouter at a debating society,
have been bandied about, hackneyed, exhausted any time these thirty
years! And yet Mr. Southey was quite ignorant of them till very lately;
they have broke upon him with a new and solemn light; they have come
upon him by surprise, after three-and-twenty years; and at the last
rebound, have overturned his tottering patriotism? Where is the use of
Mr. Southey’s _regular scholastic education_, if he is to be thus
ignorant at twenty, thus versatile at forty? The object of such an
education is to make men less astonished at their own successive
discoveries, by putting them in possession before-hand of what has been
discovered by others. Mr. Southey cannot, like Mr. Cobbett, plead in
extenuation of his change of sentiment, that he was a self-taught man,
who had to grope his way from error and prejudice to truth and reason;
neither can he plead like Mr. Cobbett, in proof of the sincerity of his
motives, that he has suffered the loss of liberty and property by his
change of opinion: Mr. Southey has suffered nothing by his—but a loss of
character!
A LETTER TO WILLIAM SMITH, ESQ. M.P. _from_ Robert Southey, _Esq._ John
Murray, Albemarle-street. 1817. Price 2_s._
(CONCLUDED.)
_May 18, 1817._
Mr. Southey in the next paragraph says, that, ‘it is a nice question, in
what degree he, as the author, partook of the sentiments expressed in
the dramatic poem of _Wat Tyler_;—too nice a one for Mr. Wm. Smith to
decide;’ and yet he accuses him of excessive malice or total want of
judgment for deciding wrong. He then falls foul of the _Monthly_, and
other Dissenting Reviews, for praising his _Joan of Arc_, and makes it
the subject of a sneer at Mr. W. Smith, that his Minor Poems were
praised by the same critical authorities on their first appearance. We
might ask here, Did not Mr. Southey himself write in these Reviews at
one time? But he might refuse to answer the question. ‘In these
productions, _Joan of Arc_,’ &c. Mr. Southey observes, and observes
truly, that Mr. W. Smith ‘might have seen expressed an enthusiastic love
of liberty,’ (not a cold-blooded recommendation to extinguish the
liberty of the press) ‘a detestation of tyranny in whatever form,’
(legitimate or illegitimate, not a palliation of all its most inveterate
and lasting abuses) ‘an ardent abhorrence of all wicked ambition,’
(particularly of that most wicked ambition which would subject mankind,
as a herd of cattle, to the power and pride of Kings) ‘and a sympathy
not less ardent with those who were engaged in war for the defence of
their country, and in a righteous cause’—to wit, the French!
Mr. Southey, however, vindicates with still more self-complacency and
success, the purity of his religious and moral character. ‘For while I
imbibed the Republican opinions of the day, I escaped the atheism and
leprous immorality which generally accompanied them. I cannot,
therefore, join with Beattie in blessing
——“The hour when I escap’d the wrangling crew,
From Pyrrho’s maze, and Epicurus’ sty;”
for I was never lost in the one, nor defiled in the other. My progress
was of a different kind.’ And Mr. Southey then tells a story, not so
good as the story of Whittington and his Cat, how he was prevented from
setting off for America to set up the Pantisocracy scheme, and turned
back, ‘from building castles in the air, and founding Christian
Commonwealths,’ to turn Poet Laureate, and write in the Quarterly
Review. The above extract is a fine specimen of character. Mr. Southey
there thanks God that he is not, and was not, _like other men_. He was
proof against the worst infection of his time. Poor Doctors Price and
Priestley, who were Republicans like Mr. Southey, were religious, moral
men; but they were Dissenters, and this excites as much contempt in Mr.
Southey, as if they had been atheists and profligates. Others again,
among Mr. Southey’s political compeers, were atheists and immoral; and
for this, Mr. Southey expresses the same abhorrence of them, as if they
had been Dissenters! He, indeed, contrives to make the defects of others
so many perfections in himself; and by this mode of proceeding,
abstracts himself into a _beau ideal_ of moral and political egotism—a
_Sir Charles Grandison_, calculated for the beginning of the nineteenth,
and the latter end of the eighteenth century, upon the true infallible
principles of intellectual coxcombry. It is well for Mr. Southey that he
never was lost ‘in Pyrrho’s maze,’ for he never would have found his way
out of it:—that his tastes were not a little more Epicurean, perhaps is
not so well for him. There is a monachism of the understanding in Mr.
Southey, which may be traced to the over-severity, the prudery of his
moral habits. He unites somewhat of the fanaticism and bigotry of the
cloister with its penances and privations. A decent mixture of the
pleasurable and the sensual, might relieve the morbid acrimony of his
temper, and a little more indulgence of his appetites might make him a
little less tenacious of his opinions. It is his not sympathising with
the enjoyments of others, that makes him feel such an antipathy to every
difference of sentiment. We hope Mr. Southey, when he was in town, went
to see _Don Giovanni_, and heard him sing that fine song, ‘Women and
wine are the sustainers and glory of life.’ We do not wish to see Mr.
Southey quite a _Don Giovanni_, (that would be as great a change in his
moral, as to see him Poet-laureate, is in his political character) but
if he had fewer pretensions to virtue, he would, perhaps, be a better
man,—‘to relish all as sharply, passioned as we!’ The author, in p. 21,
informs Mr. W. Smith, that his early Poems, which contain all the
political spirit, without the dramatic form, of _Wat Tyler_, are
continually on sale, and that he has never attempted to withdraw them?
Why does he not withdraw them, or why did he attempt to get an
Injunction against poor _Wat_? Some one who does not know Mr.
Southey—has suggested as an answer,—By not withdrawing the Poems, he
pockets the receipts; and by getting an Injunction against _Wat Tyler_,
he would have done the same thing. In p. 23, Mr. Southey states, that he
is ‘in the same _rank in society_’ as Mr. Smith, which we have yet to
learn: and that he and Mr. Smith ‘were cast by nature in different
moulds,’ which we think was lucky for the Member for Norwich. In p. 25,
Mr. Southey rails at ‘the whole crew of ultra Whigs and Anarchists, from
Messrs. Brougham and Clodius, down to Cobbett, Cethegus and Co.’; and in
pages 26, 27, he compliments himself: ‘I ask you, Sir, in which of my
writings I have appealed to the base and malignant feelings of
mankind;—and I ask you, whether the present race of revolutionary
writers appeal to any other? What man’s private character did I stab?
Whom did I libel? Whom did I slander? Whom did I traduce? THESE
MISCREANTS LIVE BY CALUMNY AND SEDITION: THEY ARE LIBELLERS AND LIARS BY
TRADE.’—After this, _Sir Anthony Absolute’s_ ‘Damn you, can’t you be
cool, like me?’ will hardly pass for a joke! ‘For a man to know another
well, were to know himself.’
But we must conclude, and shall do so, with some passages taken at a
venture. ‘I did not fall into the error of those, who, having been the
friends of France when they imagined that the cause of liberty was
implicated in her success, transferred their attachment from the
Republic to the military tyranny in which it ended, and regarded with
complacency the progress of oppression, because France was the
oppressor.’ What does Mr. Southey call that military establishment which
is at present kept up in France to keep the Bourbons on the throne, and
to keep down the French people? Mr. Southey has, it seems, transferred
his attachment from the Republic, not to Bonaparte, but to the Bourbons.
_They_ stand Mr. Southey instead of the Republic; they are the true
‘children and champions of Jacobinism’; the legitimate heirs and
successors of the Revolution. We have never fallen into that error—into
the error of preferring the monstrous claim of hereditary and perpetual
despotism over whole nations, to a power raised to whatever height, (a
gigantic, but glorious height) in repelling that monstrous claim; a
claim set up in contempt of human nature and human liberty, and never
quitted for a single instant; the unwearied, implacable, systematic
prosecution of which claim, to force the doctrine of Divine Right on the
French people, caused all the calamities of the Revolution, all the
horrors of anarchy, and all the evils of military despotism, with loss
of liberty and independence; and the restoring and hallowing of which
claim, to hold mankind as slaves in perpetuity, Mr. Southey hails as the
deliverance of mankind, and ‘a consummation devoutly to be wished.’ ‘O
fool, fool, fool!’ He cannot go along with France when France becomes
the oppressor; nor can he leave the Allies when they become the
oppressors, when they return to the point from whence they set out in
1792. He could not accompany the march to Paris then, but he has run all
the way by the side of it twice since, with his laurel wreath on his
head, playing tricks and antics like a Jack-of-the Green. We explained
this before. Mr. Southey was a revolutionary weathercock; he is become a
court-fixture. ‘They (says he, meaning us[37]) had turned their faces
towards the East in the morning, to worship the rising sun, and in the
evening they were looking eastward still, obstinately affirming that
still the sun was there. I, on the contrary, altered my position as the
world went round.’ It is not always that a simile runs on all-fours; but
this does. The sun, indeed, passes from the East to the West, but it
rises in the East again: yet Mr. Southey is still looking in the
West—for his pension. The world has gone round a second time, but he has
not altered his position—at the Treasury door. Does the sun of Liberty
still rise over the towers of the Inquisition? Is its glow kindled at
the funeral pile of massacred Protestants? Does its breath issue in vain
from French dungeons, in which all those are confined who cannot forget
that for twenty-five years they have been counted men, not slaves to
Louis XVIII., under God and the Prince Regent? The doctrine of Divine
Right has been restored, and Mr. Southey is still dreaming of military
usurpation. The Inquisition has been re-established, and Mr. Southey
still talks of the deliverance of Spain and Portugal. The war was
renewed to put down Bonaparte as a military usurper, and not, as it was
stated, to force the Bourbons as the legitimate Sovereigns, back upon
the French nation; and yet the moment he was put down, the Bourbons were
forced back upon the French people; (he was the only barrier between
them and the delicious doctrine of Divine Right) and yet Mr. Southey
says nothing of this monstrous outrage and insult on them, on us, on all
mankind: his spirits are frozen up by this word ‘legitimacy,’ as fish
are in a pond: and yet he does say something—for he dotes, and raves,
and drivels about national monuments to commemorate the final triumph
over national independence and human rights.
Mr. Southey next gives us his succedaneum to the doctrine of Legitimacy;
and a precious piece of quackery it is:—
‘Slavery has long ceased to be tolerable in Europe: the remains of
feudal oppression are disappearing even in those countries which have
improved the least: nor can it be much longer endured, that the extremes
of ignorance, wretchedness, and brutality, should exist in the very
centre of civilized society. There can be no safety with a populace,
_half Luddite, half Lazzaroni_. Let us not deceive ourselves. We are far
from that state in which any thing resembling equality would be
possible; but we are arrived at that state in which _the extremes of
inequality_ are become intolerable. _They are too dangerous, as well as
too monstrous, to be borne much longer._ Plans which would have led to
the utmost horrors of insurrection, have been prevented by the
government, and by the enactment of strong, but necessary laws. Let it
not, however, be supposed that the disease is healed, because the ulcer
may skin over. The remedies by which the body politic can be restored to
health, must be slow in their operation. The condition of the populace,
physical, moral, and intellectual, must be improved, or a _Jacquerie_, a
_Bellum Servile_, sooner or later, will be the result. _It is the people
at this time who stand in need of reformation, not the government._’
We could not have said most of this better ourselves; and yet he
adds—‘The Government must better the condition of the populace; and
the first thing necessary is’—to do what—to suppress the liberty of
the press, and make Mr. Southey the keeper. That is, the Government
must put a stop to the press, in order that they may continue, with
perfect impunity, all the other evils complained of, which Mr. Southey
says are too dangerous, as well as too monstrous to be borne. Put down
the liberty of the press, and leave it to Mr. Southey and the
Quarterly Review to remove ‘the extremes of inequality, ignorance,
wretchedness, and brutality, existing in the very centre of civilized
society,’ and they will remain there long enough. Remove them, and
what will become of Mr. Southey and the Quarterly Review? This modest
gentleman and mild reformer, proposes to destroy at once the freedom
of discussion, to prevent its ultimate loss; to make us free by first
making us slaves; to put a gag in the mouths of the people instead of
bread; to increase the comforts of the poor by laying on more taxes;
to spread abroad the spirit of liberty and independence, by teaching
the doctrines of Passive Obedience and Non-resistance; and to
encourage the love of peace by crying up the benefits of war, and
deprecating the loss of a war-establishment. The borough-mongers will
not object to such a helpmate in the cause of reform. In the midst of
all this desultory jargon, the author somehow scrapes acquaintance
with Mr. Owen, and we find them disputing about the erection of a
chapel of ease on a piece of waste ground. ‘To build upon any other
foundation than religion, is building upon sand,’ says Mr. Southey,
with a sort of _Do-me-good_ air, as if in giving his advice he had
performed an act of charity. We did not hear Mr. Owen’s answer, but we
know that a nod is as good as a wink to that gentleman. Mr. Southey
then talks of the Established Church, whom, as well as the Government,
in his courtly way, he accuses of having for centuries ‘neglected its
first and paramount duty,’ the bettering the condition of the people;
of Saving Banks; of colonies of disbanded soldiers and sailors; of
columns of Waterloo and Trafalgar; of diminishing the poor-rates, and
improving the morals of the people, so that they may live without
eating; of the glories of our war-expenditure, and of the necessity of
keeping up the same expenditure in time of peace. ‘Never indeed,’ he
exclaims, ‘was there a more senseless cry than that which is at this
time raised for retrenchment in the public expenditure, as a means of
alleviating the present distress.’ [This senseless cry, however, is
either an echo of, or was echoed by, the Prince Regent in his Speech
from the Throne. Is there no better understanding between Mr. Southey
and the Prince Regent’s advisers?]—‘That distress arises from a great
and sudden diminution of employment, occasioned by many coinciding
causes, the chief of which is, that the war-expenditure of from forty
to fifty millions yearly, has ceased.’—[No, the chief is, that our
war-expenses of from forty to fifty millions yearly and for ever, are
continued, and that our war-monopoly of trade to pay them with has
ceased.]—‘Men are out of employ’—[True.]... ‘the evil is, that too
little is spent,’ [Because we have wasted too much.]—‘and as a remedy,
we are exhorted to spend less.’ [‘Yes, to waste less, or to spend what
we have left in things useful to ourselves, and not in Government
gimcracks, whether of peace or war.’] Is it better, does Mr. Southey
think, that ten poor men should keep ten pounds a-piece in their
pockets, which they would of course spend in food, clothing, fuel, &c.
for themselves and families, or that this hundred pounds, that is, ten
pounds a-piece, should be paid out of the pockets of these ten poor
men in _taxes_, which, added to Mr. Croker’s salary, would enable him
to keep another horse, to pay for the feed, furniture, saddle, bridle,
whip, and spurs? We ask Mr. Southey this question, and will put the
issue of the whole argument upon the answer to it. The money would be
spent equally in either case, say in agriculture, in raising corn for
instance, wheat or oats: but the corn raised and paid for by it in the
one instance would go into the belly of the poor man and his family:
in the other, into the belly of Mr. Croker’s horse. Does that make no
difference to Mr. Southey? Answer, Man of Humanity! Or, if Mr.
Southey, the Man of Humanity, will not answer, let Mr. Malthus, the
Man of God, answer for him! Again, what would go to pay for a new
saddle for the Secretary of the Admiralty, would buy the poor man and
his family so many pair of shoes in the year; or what would pay for a
straw litter for his sleek gelding, would stuff a flock-bed for the
poor man’s children! Does not Mr. Southey understand this question
yet? We have given him a clue to the whole difference between
productive and unproductive labour, between waste and economy, between
taxes and no taxes, between a war-expenditure and what ought to be a
peace-establishment, between money laid out and debts contracted in
gunpowder, in cannon, in ships of war, in scattering death, and money
laid out in paying for food, furniture, houses, the comforts,
necessaries, and enjoyments of life. Let Mr. Southey take the problem
and the solution with him to Italy, study it there amidst a
population, half Lazzaroni, half Monks:[38] let him see his error, and
return an honest man! But if he will not believe us, let him at least
believe himself. In the career of his triumph about our national
monuments, he has fallen into one of the most memorable lapses of
memory we ever met with. ‘In proportion,’ says he, ‘to their
magnificence, also, will be the present benefit, as well as the future
good; for they are not like the Egyptian pyramids, to be raised by
bondsmen under rigorous taskmasters: the wealth which is taken from
the people returns to them again, like vapours which are drawn
imperceptibly from the earth, but distributed to it in refreshing
dews[39] and fertilizing showers. What bounds could imagination set to
the welfare and glory of this island, if a tenth part, or even a
twentieth of what the war expenditure has been, were annually applied
in improving and creating harbours, in bringing our roads to the best
possible state, in colonizing upon our waste lands, in reclaiming fens
and conquering tracks from the sea, in encouraging the liberal arts,
in erecting churches, in building and endowing schools and colleges,
and making war upon physical and moral evil with the whole artillery
of wisdom and righteousness, with all the resources of science, and
all the ardour of enlightened and enlarged benevolence!’
Well done, Mr. Southey. No man can argue better, when he argues against
himself. What! one-twentieth part of this enormous waste of money laid
out in war, which has sunk the nation into the lowest state of
wretchedness, would, if wisely and beneficially laid out in works of
peace, have raised the country to the pinnacle of prosperity and
happiness! Mr. Southey in his raptures forgets his war-whoop, and is
ready to exclaim with _Sancho Panza_, when the exploits of
knight-errantry are over, and he turns all his enthusiasm to a pastoral
account, ‘Oh what delicate wooden spoons shall I carve! What crumbs and
cream shall I devour!’ Mr. Southey goes on to state, among other
_items_, that ‘Government should reform its prisons.’ But Lord
Castlereagh, soon after the war-addition to Mr. Croker’s peace-salary,
said that this was too expensive. In short, the author sums up all his
hopes and views in the following sentences:—‘Government must reform the
populace, the people must reform themselves.’ The interpretation of
which is, The Government must prevent the lower classes from reading any
thing; the middle classes should read nothing but the Quarterly Review.
‘This is the true Reform, and compared with this, all else is, _flocci,
nauci, nihili, pili_.’
The last page of this performance is ‘as arrogant a piece of paper’ as
was ever scribbled. We give it as it stands. ‘It will be said of him,
(Mr. S.) that in an age of personality, he abstained from satire; and
that during the course of his literary life, often as he was assailed,
the only occasion on which he ever _condescended_ to reply, was, when _a
certain Mr. William Smith_’—[What, was the only person worthy of Mr.
Southey’s notice a very insignificant person?] ‘insulted him in
Parliament with the appellation of Renegade. On that occasion, it will
be said, that he vindicated himself, _as it became him to do_: [How so?
Mr. Southey is only a literary man, and neither a commoner nor a peer of
the realm] ‘and treated his calumniator _with just and memorable
severity_. Whether it shall be added, that Mr. William Smith redeemed
his own character, by coming forward with honest manliness, and
acknowledging that he had spoken rashly and unjustly, concerns himself,
but is not of the slightest importance to me.
ROBERT SOUTHEY.’
We do not think this conclusion is very like what Mr. Southey somewhere
wishes the conclusion of his life to resemble—‘the high leaves upon the
holly tree.’ Mr. Southey’s asperities do not wear off, as he grows
older. We are always disposed to quarrel with ourselves for quarrelling
with him, and yet we cannot help it, whenever we come in contact with
his writings. We met him unexpectedly the other day in St. Giles’s, (it
was odd we should meet _him_ there) were sorry we had passed him without
speaking to an old friend, turned and looked after him for some time, as
to a tale of other times—sighing, as we walked on, _Alas poor Southey!_
‘We saw in him a painful hieroglyphic of humanity; a sad memento of
departed independence; a striking instance of the rise and fall of
patriot bards!’ In the humour we were in, we could have written a better
epitaph, for him than he has done for himself. We went directly and
bought his Letter to Mr. W. Smith, which appeared the same day as
himself, and this at once put an end to our sentimentality.
ON THE SPY-SYSTEM
_Morning Chronicle_, _June 30, 1817_.
Lord Castlereagh, in the debate some evenings ago, appeared in a new
character, and mingled with his usual stock of political common places,
some lively moral paradoxes, after a new French pattern. According to
his Lordship’s comprehensive and liberal views, the liberty and
independence of nations are best supported abroad by the point of the
bayonet; and morality, religion, and social order, are best defended at
home by spies and informers. It is a pretty system, and worthy of itself
from first to last. The Noble Lord in the blue ribbon took the
characters of Castles and Oliver under the protection of his blushing
honours and elegant casuistry, and lamented that by the idle clamour
raised against such characters, _Gentlemen_ were deterred from entering
into the honourable, useful, and profitable profession of Government
Spies. Perhaps this piece of intellectual gallantry on the part of the
Noble Lord, was not quite so disinterested as it at first appears. There
might be something of fellow-feeling in it. The obloquy which lights on
the underlings in such cases, sometimes glances indirectly on their
principals and patrons; nor do they wipe it off by becoming their
defenders. Lord Castlereagh may say with _Lingo_ in the play, who boasts
‘that he is not a scholar, but a master of scholars,’ that he is not a
spy, but a creator of spies and informers—not a receiver, but a
distributor of blood-money—not a travelling companion and scurvy
accomplice in the forging and uttering of sham treasons and
accommodation plots, but head of the town-firm established for that
purpose—not the dupe or agent of the treason hatched by others, but
chief mover and instigator of the grand plot for increasing the power of
the Sovereign, by hazarding the safety of his person. Lord Castlereagh
recommended the character of his accomplices, as spies and informers, to
the respect and gratitude of the country and the House; he lamented the
prejudice entertained against this species of patriotic service, as
hindering _gentlemen_ from resorting to it as a liberal and honourable
profession. One of these delicious protegés of ministerial gratitude,
was, it seems, at one time a distributor of forged notes, and gained the
reward promised by Act of Parliament, by hanging his accomplices. Could
not his Lordship’s nice notions of honour relax a little farther, and
recommend the legal traffic in bank notes and blood-money, as a new
opening to honourable ambition and profitable industry? Castles’s wife
was also the keeper of a house of ill fame. Could not his Lordship, with
the hand of a master, have drawn a veil of delicacy over this slight
stain in his character, and redeemed a profession, not without high
example to justify it, from the vulgar obloquy that attends it? We are
afraid his Lordship is but half an adept in these sort of lax paradoxes,
and that Peachum, Jonathan Wild, and Count Fathom, are much honester
teachers of that kind of transcendental morality than he. This kind of
revolutionary jargon must have sounded oddly in the ears of some of his
Lordship’s hearers. Mr. Wynne, who dreads all re-action so much, must
have looked particularly argute at this innovation in the parliamentary
theory of moral sentiments. What would the country gentlemen say to it?
One would think Lord Lascelles’s hat, that broad brimmed monument of
true old English respectability, must have cowered and doubled down in
dog’s ears at the sound! What will the ardent and superannuated zeal of
that _preux Chevalier_, the Editor of _The Day and New Times_, say to
this stain upon the innate honour and purity of legitimacy, to this new
proof that ‘the age of chivalry is gone for ever, and that of
sophisters, economists, and calculators, has succeeded!’ What will John
Bull, who has been crammed these twenty-five years with the draff and
husks of concrete prejudices, unsifted, unbolted, in their rawest state,
say to the analytical distinctions, to the refined _police_-morality of
the Noble Lord? We might consider his harangue on the public services
and private virtues of spies and informers, according to the
utility-doctrine of modern philosophy, as forming an era in the history
of English loyalty and Parliamentary pliability. What! Is it meant,
after building up the present system of power and influence on the
accumulated pile of our political prejudices, to extend and strengthen
it, by undermining all our moral sentiments and national habits? Yet we
are told, that there is no imputation on the _moral_ character of
Oliver! We wonder Mr. Wilberforce did not suggest that his _religious_
character also remained unimpeached, except, indeed, that he had been
guilty of subornation of treason on the Sabbath-day. According to our
present catechism of legitimacy, to be a _cat’s-paw_ is to be
virtuous—is to be moral—is to be pious—is to be loyal—is to be a
patriot—is to be what Castles _is_, and Castlereagh _approves_!—This
subject naturally leads us into low company and low allusions. As, after
Fielding’s Hero had finished his speech on _honour_ his friend the
_Count_ pronounced him a Great Prig, so, after Lord Castlereagh’s speech
of Monday evening, we can no longer refuse to consider him a Great Man,
in the sense of the philosophical historian; that is to say, a man who
has a very great regard for himself, and a very great contempt for the
prejudices and feelings of the rest of mankind.
ON THE SPY-SYSTEM (_continued_)
_July 15, 1817._
The debate in the House of Commons on Mr. Brougham’s motion took a very
spirited, and rather personal turn. We do not think Lord Castlereagh was
quite successful in rebutting the principal charges brought against his
foreign and domestic policy. With respect to Genoa, for instance, and
the late arbitrary contributions levied on British merchants there, his
Lordship seemed to say that he had but one object, and that in this
respect his conduct had been uniformly consistent while abroad, namely,
to protect legitimacy, and that the rights and property of British
subjects were accordingly left to shift for themselves, as things
beneath his notice. This answer will hardly satisfy most of our readers.
He considered it an illiberal and injurious policy to attempt to force
our exclusive commercial interests upon foreign nations. But is there no
alternative in his Lordship’s mind between bullying and domineering over
other nations, and tamely crouching under every species of insult or act
of pillage they may wantonly exercise upon us? We have put down the
colossal power of Bonaparte. Is every ‘petty tyrant’ who has succeeded
him, to brave us with impunity, lest a word of remonstrance, a whisper
of complaint, should rouse their vengeance? Are we not to mention their
names, lest these new Gods of the earth, these modern _Dii Minores_,
should hear us! His Lordship also appears to despair of the restoration
of peace in Spanish America. If he includes in the idea of _peace_ the
quiet re-establishment of the tyranny of the old Government, we are
happy to agree with him.
With respect to the changes which have taken place at home, his Lordship
failed in making the necessity for them clear to our understandings. We
cannot assent to the accuracy of his statements, or the soundness of his
logic. He has suspended the laws of the country to save us from the
danger of anarchy! We deny the danger, and deprecate the remedy. If
ministers could afford to fan the flame of insurrection, to _alarm_ the
country into a surrender of its liberties, we contend that a danger that
could be thus tampered with, thus made a convenient pretence for seizing
a power beyond the law to put it down, might have been put down _without
a power beyond the law_. If a Government’s conspiring against itself
were a sufficient ground for arming it with arbitrary power, no country
could for a moment be safe against ministerial treachery and
encroachment, against real despotism founded on pretended disaffection.
Government would be in perpetual convulsions and affected hysterics,
like a fine lady who wants to domineer over her credulous husband. We
deny that disaffection existed, except that kind which arose from
extreme distress. Hunger is not disloyalty. Nor can we admit that a
Government’s having reduced a country to a state of unparalleled
distress, and consequent desperation, is a reason for giving
_carte-blanche_ to the Government, and putting the people under military
execution. At this rate, the worse the Government, the more firmly it
ought to be rooted: the greater the abuse of confidence, the more blind
and unlimited the confidence ought to be: and any administration need
only bring a nation to the brink of ruin, in order to have a right to
plunge it into the depths of slavery. It is easy to keep the peace with
the sword;—more flattering to the pride of power to crush resistance to
oppression, than to remove the causes of it. To reduce a people to the
alternative of rebellion or of arbitrary sway, does not require the
talents of a great statesman. If Lord Castlereagh claims the merit of
having reduced us to that alternative, we shall not dispute it with him:
whatever may be the result, we cannot thank him.
His Lordship might, however, have made good his retreat, with a decent
orderly appearance, if he had not chosen to go out of his way to take up
a Spy behind him on his new metaphysical charger, and to ride the high
horse over all those, who are not the fast friends and staunch admirers
of that profession, as traitors and _no true men_. Sir Francis Burdett,
not relishing this assault of the master and man, pulled off the Squire,
and rolling him in the mud, pelted him so unmercifully with Irish
evidence and musty affidavits of his friends and relations, that his
gallant patron, seeing the plight he was in, dismounted, and was
condescending enough to acknowledge, that ‘cruelty was in every species
detestable,’ and that ‘he lamented to think that there were miscreants
in human nature capable of committing crime for the love of reward’;
sentiments not new indeed, but new in his Lordship’s mouth. The country
gentlemen must have felt relieved, and Lord Lascelles’s hat have
recovered its primitive shape! The House of Commons is no dupe; Lord
Castlereagh no driveller. Would he then seriously persuade them, that
the Spy hanged his old friends and accomplices out of pure love to his
country, and disinterested friendship to his Lordship? We would advise
the noble Lord in the blue ribbon to _cut_ his parliamentary connexion
with his police acquaintance at once. The thing cannot answer; it is
against decorum. He might as well introduce his scavenger as a person of
fashion at Carlton-House, as attempt to pass off his _Spy_ as a
gentleman, and a man of honour, any where else! The gentlemen-ushers
would turn up their noses at one of his Lordship’s necessary appendages,
and the moral sense of the English nation turns with disgust from the
other, when forced upon it as a _beau morceau_ of morality, with the
_sauce picquant_ of ministerial panegyric! We were glad to find the
former Secretary for Ireland reprobating the practice of flogging to
extract evidence, as ‘a most wicked and unwarrantable piece of torture’;
a confession which seemed to be extorted from his Lordship by the
impression made by the reading of some of Mr. Finnerty’s affidavits, as
they are called, though they are no more Mr. Finnerty’s affidavits, who
procured them, than they are Mr. Bennet’s, who read them. Every thing
relating to this subject is particularly interesting at this moment,
when the same power is vested in the same hands in this country, that
was wielded twenty years ago in Ireland—not indeed as a precedent to the
English government, but as a warning to the English people. We give no
opinion on the truth or falsehood of the allegations contained in the
affidavits, but we do say, that the noble Secretary reasoned very badly
on the subject. He says that Mr. Finnerty is not a very loyal man, that
is, he is not very strongly attached to his Lordship’s person or
government, and therefore neither Mr. Finnerty, nor any person taking an
oath in an Irish court of justice, reflecting on his Lordship’s
administration, is to be believed. Mr. Finnerty published an account of
the proceedings on Orr’s trial, which was deemed a libel, and therefore
the whole history of the Irish rebellion and of the year 1798 is a
fable. Lord Castlereagh would not consent to quash his prosecution of
Mr. Finnerty on this ground some years ago, because he would not shun
inquiry, and yet the affidavits were not suffered to be read in court,
and his lordship deprecates their production in parliament. He thinks it
hard that he must be called on to prove a negative, when others swear
positively to the affirmative. Accusation against his Lordship is to
pass not for a proof of guilt but innocence, and his inability to refute
the charge only calls for a greater degree of candid interpretation and
implicit faith in his Lordship’s word. Insinuation only requires
confidence to repel it—proof more confidence—conviction unlimited
confidence. Whether the things ever happened or no, they are to be
equally buried in eternal silence in Mr. Finnerty’s ‘disloyal breast’:
not a tittle of evidence is to be suffered to escape from the budget of
affidavits which he has got together by forbidden means. His Lordship’s
Irish administration is to be inscrutable as another Providence, secret
as another Inquisition; the English Parliament are to put the broad seal
of their sanction upon it! It was certainly unlucky at this juncture of
the debate, that Mr. W. Smith should have started up with the case of
Mr. Judkin Fitzgerald, who (it seems, by his own account of his
services, not from any affidavits against him) had been most active in
inflicting this ‘cruel and unwarrantable species of torture,’ and was
made a Baronet in consequence.
‘And struts Sir Judkin, an exceeding knave!’
The unconsciousness of the Irish government exceeds every thing. They
are not only ‘innocent of the knowledge, till they applaud the deed,’
but ignorant of it, after they have applauded it. It is no wonder that
the fixed air and volatile spirit of Mr. Canning’s wit frothed up at
this indiscreet mention of Sir Judkin, and that he wished to ‘bury him
quick,’ under the artificial flowers of his oratory. _The dead tell no
tales_—of the dead or the living! Mr. Canning twitted Mr. W. Smith with
attacking the dead, because ‘he had found that the absent could answer.’
Does this allude to the Laureate? If so, let Mr. Canning call for more
flowers, and lay him by the side of Sir Judkin. This allusion to the
answer to Mr. W. Smith is, however, remarkably candid, as Mr. Southey
declares in it that he never thought Mr. Canning worth an answer. He may
now return the compliment in kind, by inscribing the next edition of his
‘Inscriptions’ to the author of the ‘Anti-Jacobin.’
ON THE TREATMENT OF STATE PRISONERS.
‘O silly sheep, come ye to seek the lamb here of the wolf!’
_July 17, 1817._
A writer in a Morning Paper, a few days ago, commented very wisely and
wittily on the situation of the State Prisoners under the Suspension of
the Habeas Corpus, as a warning to the people of England not to meddle
in politics. He seemed infinitely amused with the inability of these
poor devils ‘to get out,’ though he seemed to know no reason why they
should be kept in. ‘One of these gentlemen must have a flute,
_forsooth_!’ he exclaims with a very hysterical air, as if it was a good
joke truly for a man to have a flute taken from him, and not to be able
to get it back again.[40] Even Mr. Hiley Addington allows that Evans
might have his flute again, if he did not use it. If this writer had
himself been in the habit of blowing a great war-trumpet, and wished to
make as much noise as ever with it in time of peace, he might not like
to have it taken from him. He, however, consoles Mr. Evans for the loss
of his flute, with the very old and original observation, ‘That the
people bear the same relation to the Government, as the sheep to the
shepherd, and that the sheep ought not to dictate to the shepherd, or
remonstrate against what he does for their good.’ Now the sheep are not
usually in the habit of dictating, or remonstrating on such occasions,
except in that sort of language which _Lawyer Scout_ advises
_Sheep-face_ to imitate before _Justice Mittimus_, and to which this
Professional Gentleman seems to wish the State Prisoners to resort in
their intercourse with the Home Department. The fleecy fools, whom the
writer holds up as models of wisdom and spirit to his countrymen, do, to
be sure, make a terrible noise at a sheep-shearing, and a short struggle
when they feel the knife at their throats. But our allegorist, we
suspect, would regard these as Jacobinical, or Ultra-Jacobinical
symptoms. He would have the people stand still to be fleeced, and have
their throats cut, whenever Government pleases. He has in his eye the
sublimest example of self-devotion: ‘As a lamb, he was led to the
slaughter: as a sheep before the shearers is dumb, so he opened not his
mouth.’ We cannot understand the point of comparison in this
_sheep-biting_ argument. If the people are really to be as silly, and as
submissive as sheep, they will be worse treated. A flock of sheep pass
their time very comfortably on Salisbury plain, biting the short sweet
grass, or lying with ‘meek mouths ruminant,’ till they are fit to send
to market: we have sometimes heard them fill the air with a troublous
cry, as they pass down Oxford-street, to Smithfield, and the next
morning it is all over with them. But Governments have not the same
reasons for taking care of the people, ‘poor, poor dumb mouths,’ they do
not ordinarily sell them or eat them. The comparison would be much
nearer to beasts of burden, asses, or ‘camels in their war,’ who, as
Shakspeare expresses it,—
——‘have their provender
Only for bearing burthens, and sore blows
For sinking under them.’
However edifying and attractive these kind of examples of simplicity,
patience, and good behaviour, taken from sheep, oxen, and asses, must be
to the people, they are rather invidious, something worse than
equivocal, as they relate to the designs and good-will of the Government
towards them. This writer indeed commits himself very strangely on this
subject, or, as the phrase is, _lets the cat out of the bag_, without
intending it. In a broadside which he published against the author of
the ‘Political Register,’ he says with infinite _naiveté_:—‘Mr. Cobbett
had been sentenced to two years’ imprisonment for a libel; and during
the time that he was in Newgate, it was discovered that he had been
secretly in treaty with Government to avoid the sentence passed upon
him; and that he had proposed to certain of the Agents of Ministers,
that if they would let him off, they might make what future use they
pleased of him: _he would entirely betray the cause of the people_: he
would either write or not write, or _write against them_, as he had once
done before, just as Ministers thought proper. To this, however, it was
replied, that “_Cobbett had written on too many sides already to be
worth a groat for the service of Government,” and he accordingly
suffered his confinement_.’
This passage is at least worth a groat: it lets us into the Editor’s
real opinion of what it is that alone makes any writer ‘worth a groat
for the service of Government,’ viz. his being able and willing
_entirely to betray the cause of the people_; and, we should hope, may
operate as an antidote to any future cant about sheep and shepherds!
The same consistent patriot and loyalist, the Sir Robert Filmer of the
day, asked some time ago—‘Where is the madman that believes the doctrine
of Divine Right? Where is the madman that asserts that doctrine?’ As no
one else was found to do it, he himself, the other day, took up his own
challenge, and affirmed, with a resolute air, that—‘Louis XVIII. had the
same right to the throne of France, independently of his merits or
conduct, that Mr. Coke, of Norfolk, had to his estate at Holkham.’ He
did not say whether James II. had the same right to the throne of
England, independently of his conduct or merits, that Louis XVIII. has
to the throne of France: but the inference of course is that the people
of France belong to Louis XVIII. just as the live stock on a farm
belongs to the owner of it, or as the slaves in the West Indies belong
to the owners of the plantation, and that mankind are neither more or
less than a herd of slaves, the property of kings. This is at least as
good a thing as the doctrine of divine right. We do not wonder that the
writer, after this ‘delicious declaration,’ thought it proper to
apologize to his court-readers for expressing his approbation of the
abolition of the Slave Trade, as indirectly compromising those
principles of legitimacy, which make one part of the species the
property of another, and which we have seen so successfully established
in Europe as the basis of liberty, humanity, and social order!
THE OPPOSITION AND ‘THE COURIER’
_July 19, 1817._
The Opposition, it seems, with Mr. Brougham at their head, ‘attack all
that is valuable in our institutions.’ So says Lord Castlereagh? and, to
make the thing the more incredible, so says _The Courier_! They attack
Sir Judkin Fitzgerald and the use of the torture; and _therefore_ they
attack all that is valuable in our institutions. They attack the system
of spies and informers; and therefore they attack all that is valuable
in our institutions. They object to the moral characters of such men as
Castles and Oliver; and therefore they attack all that is most
respectable in the country. They consider Lord Sidmouth, who is ‘to
acquaint us with the perfect spy o’ th’ time,’ as no conjurer, treat his
circular letters and itinerant incendiaries with as little ceremony as
respect; and therefore they are hostile to all that is venerable in our
constituted authorities. They do not approve of the Suspension of the
Habeas Corpus, of Standing Armies, and Rotten Boroughs; and therefore
they would overturn all that is most valuable in the Constitution. They
say that Lord Castlereagh was connected with the measures of the Irish
government in the year 1798; and they are said to hold a language
‘grossly libellous.’ They say that they do not wish the same system to
be introduced by his Lordship in this country; and their principles are
denounced as ‘of a decidedly revolutionary character.’ They think of the
present administration as Mr. Canning formerly thought of it, and they
think of Mr. Canning as all the world think. Is that all? Oh no! They
speak against the renewal of the Income Tax; and this, in the opinion of
some persons, is attacking what is more valuable than all our other
institutions put together! For our own parts, our political confession
of faith on this subject is short: we neither consider Lord Castlereagh
as the Constitution, nor _The Courier_ as the Country.
But if, after all, and in spite of our teeth, we should be forced to
acknowledge that Sir Judkin Fitzgerald and the use of the torture, that
the system of spies and informers, that Lord Sidmouth’s sagacity,
circulars, and travelling delegates, that arbitrary imprisonment and
solitary confinement, the Suspension of the Habeas Corpus, Standing
Armies, and Rotten Boroughs, Lord Castlereagh’s past measures or future
designs, Mr. Canning’s love of liberty, and Mr. Vansittart’s hankerings
after the Income Tax, are all that is left _valuable in our
institutions, or respectable in the country_, then we must say, that the
more effectually the Opposition ‘attack all that is valuable in such
institutions,’ the more we shall thank them; and that the sooner we can
get rid of all that is ‘most respectable’ in such a system, the less
occasion we shall have to blush for the Country.
ENGLAND IN 1798
BY S. T. COLERIDGE.
_August 2, 1817._
‘The Monthly Magazine tells us that this country has occasioned the
death of 5,800,000 persons in Calabria, Russia, Poland, Germany, France,
Spain, and Portugal. This country, reader, England! our country, our
great, our glorious, our beloved country, according to this Magazine,
has been the guilty cause of all this carnage!’—So says _Mr. Southey_
apud _the Quarterly Review_, 1817. Thus sings Mr. Coleridge, in his
‘Fears in Solitude,’ 1798:—
‘We have offended, oh! my countrymen!
We have offended very grievously,
And been most tyrannous.
——Thankless too for peace;
(Peace long preserv’d by fleets and perilous seas)
Secure from actual warfare, we have lov’d
To swell the war-whoop, passionate for war!
Alas! for ages ignorant of all
Its ghastlier workings (famine or blue plague,
Battle, or siege, or flight through wintry snows),
We, this whole people, have been clamorous
For war and bloodshed; animating sports,
The which we pay for as a thing to talk of,
Spectators and not combatants! No guess
Anticipative of a wrong unfelt,
No speculation on contingency.
However dim and vague, too vague and dim
To yield a justifying cause; and forth
(Stuff’d out with big preamble, holy names,
And adjurations of the God in Heaven),
We send our mandates for the certain death
Of thousands and ten thousands! Boys and girls,
And women, that would groan to see a child
Pull off an insect’s leg, all read of war,
The best amusement for our morning’s meal!
The poor wretch, who has learnt his only prayers
For curses, who knows scarcely words enough
To ask a blessing from his Heavenly Father,
Becomes a fluent phraseman, absolute
And technical in victories and defeat,
And all our dainty terms for fratricide;
Terms which we trundle smoothly o’er our tongues,
Like mere abstractions, empty sounds to which
We join no feeling and attach no form!
As if the soldier died without a wound;
As if the fibres of this godlike frame
Were gored without a pang; as if the wretch
Who fell in battle, doing bloody deeds,
Pass’d off to heaven, translated, and not killed;
As though he had no wife to pine for him—
No God to judge him! Therefore, evil days
Are coming on us, O my countrymen!
And what if all-avenging Providence,
Strong and retributive, should make us know
The meaning of our words; force us to feel
The desolation and the agony
Of our fierce doings!
I have told,
O Britons! O my brethren! I have told
Most bitter truth, but without bitterness.
Nor deem my zeal or factious or mistimed:
For never can true courage dwell with them,
Who playing tricks with conscience, dare not look
At their own vices. We have been too long
Dupes of a deep delusion!—Others, meanwhile,
Dote with a mad idolatry; and all
Who will not fall before their images,
And yield them worship, they are enemies
Even of their country!
Such have I been deem’d.[41]—
S. T. C.
ON THE EFFECTS OF WAR AND TAXES
‘Great princes have great playthings. Some have play’d
At hewing mountains into men, and some
At building human wonders mountain-high.
But war’s a game, which, were their subjects wise,
Kings would not play at.’ COWPER.
_August 13, 1817._
The whole question of the effect of war and taxes, in an economical
point of view, reduces itself to the distinction between _productive_
and _unproductive labour_. It is a pity that some member of the House of
Commons does not move a string of resolutions on this subject, as a
comment on the measures of the present, and a guide to those of future
reigns. A film appears to have been spread for some time over the eyes
of the nation, as to the consequences of the course they were pursuing;
and a good deal of pains has been taken, by sophistry, and false
statements, to perplex a very plain question. But we are not without
hopes, in the following observations, of putting the merits of our debt
and taxes in so clear a light, that not even the Finance Committee shall
be any longer blind to them.
Labour is of two kinds, productive and unproductive:—that which adds
materially to the comforts and necessaries of life, or that which adds
nothing to the common stock, or nothing in proportion to what it takes
away from it in order to maintain itself. Money may be laid out, and
people employed in either of these two kinds of labour equally, but not,
we imagine, with equal benefit to the community.—[_See p. 130, &c. of
this volume._]
Suppose I employ a man in standing on his head, or running up and down a
hill all day, and that I give him five shillings a day for his pains. He
is equally employed, equally paid, and equally gains a subsistence in
this way, as if he was employed, in his original trade of a shoemaker,
in making a pair of shoes for a person who wants them. But in the one
case he is employed in unproductive, in the other in productive labour.
In the one, he is employed and paid and receives a subsistence for doing
that which might as well be let alone; in the other, for doing that
which is of use and importance, and which must either be done by him, or
give some one else double trouble to do it. If I hire a livery-servant,
and keep him fine and lazy and well-fed to stand behind my chair while I
eat turtle or venison, this is another instance of unproductive labour.
Now the person who is in real want of a pair of shoes, and who has by
his own labour and skill raised money enough to pay for them will not
assuredly lay it out, in preference, in hiring the shoemaker to run up a
hill for him, or to stand upon his head, or behind a chair for his
amusement.[42] But if I have received this money from him in the shape
of taxes, having already received enough in the same way to pay for my
shoes, my stockings, my house, my furniture, &c., then it is very likely
(as we see it constantly happen) that I shall lay out this last five
shillings worth of taxes, which I probably get for doing nothing, in
employing another person to do nothing,—or to run up a hill, or to stand
upon his head, or wait behind me at dinner, while the poor man, who pays
me the tax, goes without his shoes and his dinner. Is this clear? Or put
it thus in two words. _That_ is productive labour, for which a man will
give the only money he has in the world, or a certain sum, having no
more than other people: _that_ is unproductive labour, for which a man
will never give the only money he is worth, the money he has earned by
his own labour, nor any money at all, unless he has ten times as much as
he wants, or as other people have, to throw away in superfluities. A man
who has only got money to buy a loaf will not lay it out in an ice. But
he may lay it out in a dram? Yes; because to the wretched it is often
more important to forget their future than even to supply their present
wants. The extravagance and thoughtlessness of the poor arise, not from
their having more than enough to satisfy their immediate necessities,
but from their not having enough to ward off impending ones,—in a word,
from _desperation_. This is the true answer to Mr. Malthus’s
politico-theological system of parish ethics, the only real clue to the
causes and the cure of pauperism!
If the Board of Works were to have a canal made from London to the
Land’s End (as has been proposed) this, for aught we know, would be
productive labour, and well paid for out of the public taxes; because
the public might in the end reap the benefit of the money and the labour
so employed. But if the Prince Regent were by the advice of some
fantastical, purblind politician, to order this canal to be lined all
the way with gold-leaf, which would be washed away as soon as the water
came into the canal, this is what we should call unproductive labour.
Such a project would indeed cost as much money, it would require the
raising of as many taxes, it would keep as many men employed, it would
maintain them while they were so employed, just as well as if they were
employed in any other way; but when done, it would be of no use to
Prince or people. We have heard of a patriotic nobleman, who had a
brick-wall built round his estate, to give employment to the poor in his
neighbourhood. If he had afterwards employed them to pull it down again,
it would have given them twice the employment and done twice the good.
But if the same persons had been employed in productive labour, in
raising corn, in making furniture, in building or improving cottages, it
would not have been equally adviseable to set them to work again to burn
the corn, or destroy the furniture, or pull down the cottages. In spite
then of the fashionable doctrines of political economy, so well suited
to the extravagance of the times, there is something else to be
considered in judging of the value of labour, besides what it costs,
_viz._, what it _produces_; whether it is of use to any body, and to
whom. All is not gain that goes out of the purse. The nobleman above
mentioned did not take the money to pay for building the wall round his
estate out of the pockets of the people; but suppose an equal sum to be
taken yearly out of the Civil List or any other branch of public
revenue, and employed in raising some huge heap of stones—not a
monument, but a mausoleum of royal taste and magnificence—the question
is, whether the money thus raised by taxes, and laid out in a job, is a
saving or a loss to the public? And this question is, we conceive,
answered by another, whether if the money had remained in the hands of
the public, they would have agreed among themselves, to have laid it out
in such a building for them to look at? It would hardly be thought wise
to vote a sum of money, to build a _Cottage Ornée_, large enough to
cover a whole county; though the expense (and, according to the theory
we are combating, the benefit) would increase with the size of the
building and the waste of work. The Pyramids of Egypt and the Pavilion
at Brighton, are among the instances of unproductive labour.
We have been twenty years at war, and have laid out five hundred
millions in war taxes; and what have we gained by it? Where are the
_proceeds_? If it has not been thrown away in what produces no return,
if it has not been sunk in the war, as much as if it had been sunk in
the sea, if the government as good factors for the general weal have
laid out all this enormous sum in useful works, in _productive labour_,
let them give us back the principal and the interest, (which is just
double) and keep the profits to themselves—instead of which, they have
made away with the principal, and come to us to pay _them_ the interest
in taxes. They have nothing to shew for either, but spiked cannon,
rotten ships, gunpowder blown into the air, heaps of dead men’s skulls,
the turned heads and coats of Poets Laureate, with the glories of
Trafalgar and Waterloo, which however will pay no scores. Let them set
them up at auction, and see what they will fetch. Not a _sous_! We have
killed so many French, it is true. But we had better have spent powder
and shot in shooting at crows. Though we have laid the ghost of the
French Revolution, we cannot ‘go to supper’ upon the carcase. If the
present distress and difficulty arise merely from our no longer having a
bugbear to contend with, or because (as Mr. Southey says), the war is no
longer a customer to the markets, to the amount of fifty millions a
year, why not declare war upon the Man in the Moon to-morrow, and never
leave off till we have sent him to keep Bonaparte company at St. Helena?
Why, it is but ordering so many cannon and cutlasses, no matter for what
purpose—and equipping, and fantastically accoutring so many loyal corps
of _minions of the moon_, _Diana’s foresters_, and ‘the manufactures of
Birmingham and Sheffield would revive to-morrow.’ If we had howitzers
before of a prodigious size, let us have bombs of a calibre that Lord
Castlereagh never dreamt of; and instead of iron balls, golden ones. Why
not? The expense would be the greater. If we made the earth ring before,
let us now make the welkin roar. The absurdity would be as costly, and
more bloodless. A voyage to the moon would take at least as much time,
as many lives and millions to accomplish as the march to Paris. But then
our merchants would not meanwhile get a monopoly of the trade of Europe,
to stimulate their laggard patriotism, nor would the sovereigns of
Europe be able to plant the standard of Legitimacy on the horns of the
moon!—But though we have nothing to shew for the money we have madly
squandered in war, we have something to pay for it (rather more than we
can afford) to contractors, monopolists, and sinecurists, to the great
fundholders and borough-mongers, to those who have helped to carry on,
and to those who have been paid for applauding this sport-royal, as the
most patriotic and profitable employment of the wealth and resources of
a country. These persons, the tax-receivers, have got a mortgage on the
property, health, strength, and skill of the rest of the community, who
pay the taxes, which bows their industry to the ground, and deprives
them of the necessary means of subsistence. The principal of the debt
which the nation has contracted, has been laid out in _unproductive
labour_, in inflicting the mischiefs and miseries of war; and the
interest is for the most part equally laid out in _unproductive labour_,
in fomenting the pride and luxury of those who have made their fortunes
by the war and taxes. In a word, the debt and taxes are a government
machine, which diverts that portion of the wealth and industry of the
people, which would otherwise be employed in supplying the wants and
comforts (say) of a hundred persons, to pamper the extravagance, vices,
and artificial appetites of a single individual; and so on in proportion
to the whole country. Every tax laid on in this manner, unnerves the arm
of industry, is wrung from the bowels of want, and breaks the spirit of
a nation, lessens the number of hands which are employed in useful
labour, to seduce them into artificial, dependent, and precarious modes
of subsistence, while the rich themselves find their reward for the
indulgence of their indolence and voluptuousness in ‘the gout, serpigo,
and the rheum,’ so that ‘their proper loins do curse them.’ It has been
said that the taxes taken from the people return to them again, like the
vapours drawn up from the earth in clouds, that descend again in
refreshing dews and fertilizing showers. On the contrary, they are like
these dews and showers drawn off from the ground by artificial channels
into private reservoirs and useless cisterns to stagnate and corrupt.
The money which is paid in taxes is taken from the people; the labour
for which it pays does not benefit the people. A tax which goes to pay
for the feeding of a pair of curricle horses or favourite hunters,
swallows up the subsistence of several poor families. We cannot for
ourselves approve of the privations, of the hunger, cold, or nakedness,
to which these poor families are exposed, to keep up the flesh and the
spirit of the sleek and high-mettled inhabitants of the warm,
well-littered stable, even though they were of the breed of Swift’s
Houynhyms! But that is a different question. All that we mean to say
here is, that the tax takes the corn out of the bellies of the one to
put it into those of the other species. A tax which is laid on to pay
for a dog-kennel or a stable, might have saved a whole village from
going into ruin and decay: and the carriage that glitters like a meteor
along the streets of the metropolis, often deprives the wretched inmate
of the distant cottage of the chair he sits on, the table be eats on,
the bed he lies on. A street lined with coaches and with beggars dying
at the steps of the doors, gives a strong lesson to common sense and
political foresight, if not to humanity. A nation cannot subsist on
unproductive labour, on war and taxes, or be composed merely of parish
and state paupers. All unproductive labour is supported by productive
labour. All persons maintained by the taxes or employed by those who are
maintained by them are a clog, a dead weight upon those who pay them,
that consume the produce of the State, and add nothing to it—a dead
carcase fastened to a living one, with this difference, that it still
devours the food which it does not provide. Need we ask any farther, how
war and taxes, sinecures and monopolies, by degrees, weaken, impoverish,
and ruin a State? Or whether they can go on increasing for ever? There
is an excess of inequality and oppression, of luxury and want, which no
state can survive; as there is a point at which the palsied frame can no
longer support itself, and at which the withered tree falls to the
ground.
If the sovereign of a country were to employ the whole population in
doing nothing but throwing stones into the sea, he would soon become the
king of a desert island. If a sovereign exhausts the wealth and strength
of a country in war, he will end in being a king of slaves and beggars.
The national debt is just the measure, the check-account of the labour
and resources of the country which have been so wasted—of the stones we
have been throwing into the sea. This debt is in fact an obligation
entered into by the government on the part of the tax-payers, to
indemnify the tax-receivers for their sacrifices in enabling the
government to carry on the war. It is a power of attorney, extorted from
nine-tenths of the community, making over to the remaining tenth an
unlimited command over the resources, the comforts, the labour, the
happiness and liberty of the great mass of society, by which their
resources, their comforts, their labour, their happiness, and their
liberty, have been lost, and made away with in government knick-knacks,
and the kickshaws of legitimacy. Half the resources and productive
labour of the country for the last twenty years, have been sunk in this
debt, and we are now called upon to make good the deficiency—how we
can!—It has been shrewdly asked, whether, if every one paid a hundred
_per cent._ income tax, the nation could flourish? And when we are told
that ‘the war has been a _customer_ to the country for a length of time
to the amount of fifty millions a year,’ that is, has drained that sum
from the pockets of the nation to employ the hands of the nation in
_producing nothing_—we are at no loss to account for the consequences. A
writer, whose own fault it is that we do not feel all the respect for
him we could wish, has ridiculed the idea of a nation being in debt to
itself, ‘like a tradesman to his creditors,’ and contends that ‘a much
fairer instance would be that of a husband and wife playing cards at the
same table against each other, where what the one loses, the other
gains.’ Now men and their wives do not usually pay one another the money
they lose at cards; and most people will be ready enough to reduce this
simile to practice, by not paying the taxes, whenever the author shall
have convinced Mr. Vansittart, that it is no matter whether the money is
in the hands of the people or the government, and that to save trouble
it had better remain where it is. Mr. Southey, in his late pamphlet, has
very emphatically described the different effects of money laid out in
war and peace. ‘What bounds,’ he exclaims, ‘could imagination set to the
welfare and glory of this island, if a tenth part, or even a twentieth
of what the war expenditure has been, were annually applied in improving
and creating harbours, in bringing roads to the best possible repair, in
colonizing upon our waste lands, in reclaiming fens, and conquering
tracts from the sea, in encouraging the liberal arts, endowing schools
and churches,’ &c. This is a singular slip of the pen in so noisy and
triumphant a war-monger as the Poet Laureate. But logical inconsistency
seems to be a sort of poetical license. Even in contradicting himself,
he is not right. For the money as he proposes to employ it, would only
degenerate into so many government jobs, and the low-lived mummery of
Bible Societies. The pinnacle of prosperity and glory to which he would
by these means raise the country, does not seem quite so certain. The
other extreme of distress and degradation, to which the war-system has
reduced it, is deep and deplorable indeed.
CHARACTER OF MR. BURKE
_October 5, 1817._
It is not without reluctance that we speak of the vices and infirmities
of such a mind as Burke’s: but the poison of high example has by far the
widest range of destruction: and, for the sake of public honour and
individual integrity, we think it right to say, that however it may be
defended upon other grounds, the political career of that eminent
individual has no title to the praise of consistency. Mr. Burke, the
opponent of the American war, and Mr. Burke, the opponent of the French
Revolution, are not the same person, but opposite persons—not opposite
persons only, but deadly enemies. In the latter period, he abandoned not
only all his practical conclusions, but all the principles on which they
were founded. He proscribed all his former sentiments, denounced all his
former friends, rejected and reviled all the maxims to which he had
formerly appealed as incontestable. In the American war, he constantly
spoke of the rights of the people as inherent, and inalienable: after
the French Revolution, he began by treating them with the chicanery of a
sophist, and ended by raving at them with the fury of a maniac. In the
former case, he held out the duty of resistance to oppression, as the
palladium and only ultimate resource of natural liberty; in the latter,
he scouted, prejudged, vilified, and nicknamed, all resistance in the
abstract, as a foul and unnatural union of rebellion and sacrilege. In
the one case, to answer the purposes of faction, he made it out, that
the people are always in the right; in the other, to answer different
ends, he made it out that they are always in the wrong—lunatics in the
hands of their royal keepers, patients in the sick-wards of an hospital,
or felons in the condemned cells of a prison. In the one, he considered
that there was a constant tendency on the part of the prerogative to
encroach on the rights of the people, which ought always to be the
object of the most watchful jealousy, and of resistance, when necessary:
in the other, he pretended to regard it as the sole occupation and
ruling passion of those in power, to watch over the liberties and
happiness of their subjects. The burthen of all his speeches on the
American war, was conciliation, concession, timely reform, as the only
practicable or desirable alternative of rebellion: the object of all his
writings on the French Revolution was, to deprecate and explode all
concession and all reform, as encouraging rebellion, and as an
irretrievable step to revolution and anarchy. In the one, he insulted
kings personally, as among the lowest and worst of mankind; in the
other, he held them up to the imagination of his readers, as sacred
abstractions. In the one case, he was a partisan of the people, to court
popularity; in the other, to gain the favour of the Court, he became the
apologist of all courtly abuses. In the one case, he took part with
those who were actually rebels against his Sovereign: in the other, he
denounced as rebels and traitors, all those of his own countrymen who
did not yield sympathetic allegiance to a foreign Sovereign, whom we had
always been in the habit of treating as an arbitrary tyrant.
Nobody will accuse the principles of his present Majesty, or the general
measures of his reign, of inconsistency. If they had no other merit,
they have, at least, that of having been all along actuated by one
uniform and constant spirit: yet Mr. Burke at one time vehemently
opposed, and afterwards most intemperately extolled them: and it was for
his recanting his opposition, not for his persevering in it, that he
received his pension. He does not himself mention his flaming speeches
in the American war, as among the public services which had entitled him
to this remuneration.
The truth is, that Burke was a man of fine fancy and subtle reflection;
but not of sound and practical judgment, nor of high or rigid
principles.—As to his understanding, he certainly was not a great
philosopher; for his works of mere abstract reasoning are shallow and
inefficient:—nor was he a man of sense and business; for, both in
counsel, and in conduct, he alarmed his friends as much at least as his
opponents:—but he was an acute and accomplished man of letters—an
ingenious political essayist. He applied the habit of reflection, which
he had borrowed from his metaphysical studies, but which was not
competent to the discovery of any elementary truth in that department,
with great facility and success, to the mixed mass of human affairs. He
knew more of the political machine than a recluse philosopher; and he
speculated more profoundly on its principles and general results than a
mere politician. He saw a number of fine distinctions and changeable
aspects of things, the good mixed with the ill, and the ill mixed with
the good; and with a sceptical indifference, in which the exercise of
his own ingenuity was obviously the governing principle, suggested
various topics to qualify or assist the judgment of others. But for this
very reason, he was little calculated to become a leader or a partizan
in any important practical measure. For the habit of his mind would lead
him to find out a reason for or against any thing: and it is not on
speculative refinements, (which belong to _every_ side of a question),
but on a just estimate of the aggregate mass and extended combinations
of objections and advantages, that we ought to decide or act. Burke had
the power of throwing true or false weights into the scales of political
casuistry, but not firmness of mind (or, shall we say, honesty enough)
to hold the balance. When he took a side, his vanity or his spleen more
frequently gave the casting vote than his judgment; and the fieriness of
his zeal was in exact proportion to the levity of his understanding, and
the want of conscious sincerity.
He was fitted by nature and habit for the studies and labours of the
closet; and was generally mischievous when he came out; because the very
subtlety of his reasoning, which, left to itself, would have
counteracted its own activity, or found its level in the common sense of
mankind, became a dangerous engine in the hands of power, which is
always eager to make use of the most plausible pretexts to cover the
most fatal designs. That which, if applied as a general observation to
human affairs, is a valuable truth suggested to the mind, may, when
forced into the interested defence of a particular measure or system,
become the grossest and basest sophistry. Facts or consequences never
stood in the way of this speculative politician. He fitted them to his
preconceived theories, instead of conforming his theories to them. They
were the playthings of his style, the sport of his fancy. They were the
straws of which his imagination made a blaze, and were consumed, like
straws, in the blaze they had served to kindle. The fine things he said
about Liberty and Humanity, in his speech on the Begum’s affairs, told
equally well, whether Warren Hastings was a tyrant or not: nor did he
care one jot who caused the famine he described, so that he described it
in a way that no one else could. On the same principle, he represented
the French priests and nobles under the old regime as excellent moral
people, very charitable and very religious, in the teeth of notorious
facts—to answer to the handsome things he had to say in favour of
priesthood and nobility in general; and, with similar views, he
falsifies the records of our English Revolution, and puts an
interpretation on the word _abdication_, of which a school-boy would be
ashamed. He constructed his whole theory of government, in short, not on
rational, but on picturesque and fanciful principles; as if the king’s
crown were a painted gewgaw, to be looked at on gala-days; titles an
empty sound to please the ear; and the whole order of society a
theatrical procession. His lamentations over the age of chivalry, and
his projected crusade to restore it, are about as wise as if any one,
from reading the Beggar’s Opera, should take to picking of pockets: or,
from admiring the landscapes of Salvator Rosa, should wish to convert
the abodes of civilized life into the haunts of wild beasts and
banditti. On this principle of false refinement, there is no abuse, nor
system of abuses, that does not admit of an easy and triumphant defence;
for there is something which a merely speculative enquirer may always
find out, good as well as bad, in every possible system, the best or the
worst; and if we can once get rid of the restraints of common sense and
honesty, we may easily prove, by plausible words, that liberty and
slavery, peace and war, plenty and famine, are matters of perfect
indifference. This is the school of politics, of which Mr. Burke was at
the head; and it is perhaps to his example, in this respect, that we owe
the prevailing tone of many of those newspaper paragraphs, which Mr.
Coleridge thinks so invaluable an accession to our political philosophy.
Burke’s literary talents were, after all, his chief excellence. His
style has all the familiarity of conversation, and all the research of
the most elaborate composition. He says what he wants to say, by any
means, nearer or more remote, within his reach. He makes use of the most
common or scientific terms, of the longest or shortest sentences, of the
plainest and most downright, or of the most figurative modes of speech.
He gives for the most part loose reins to his imagination, and follows
it as far as the language will carry him. As long as the one or the
other has any resources in store to make the reader feel and see the
thing as he has conceived it, in its nicest shades of difference, in its
utmost degree of force and splendour, he never disdains, and never fails
to employ them. Yet, in the extremes of his mixed style, there is not
much affectation, and but little either of pedantry or of coarseness. He
everywhere gives the image he wishes to give, in its true and
appropriate colouring: and it is the very crowd and variety of these
images that has given to his language its peculiar tone of animation,
and even of passion. It is his impatience to transfer his conceptions
entire, living, in all their rapidity, strength, and glancing variety,
to the minds of others, that constantly pushes him to the verge of
extravagance, and yet supports him there in dignified security—
‘Never so sure our rapture to create,
As when he treads the brink of all we hate.’
He is the most poetical of our prose writers, and at the same time his
prose never degenerates into the mere effeminacy of poetry; for he
always aims at overpowering rather than at pleasing; and consequently
sacrifices beauty and delicacy to force and vividness. He has invariably
a task to perform, a positive purpose to execute, an effect to produce.
His only object is therefore to strike hard, and in the right place; if
he misses his mark, he repeats his blow; and does not care how
ungraceful the action, or how clumsy the instrument, provided it brings
down his antagonist.
ON COURT-INFLUENCE
‘To be honest as this world goes, is to be one man picked out of ten
thousand.’
_January 3, 1818._
It is not interest alone, but prejudice or fashion that sways mankind.
Opinion governs opinion. It is not merely what we can get by a certain
line of conduct that we have to consider, but what others will think of
it. The possession of money is but one mode of recommending ourselves to
the good opinion of the world, of securing distinction and respect.
Except as a bribe to popularity, money is of very limited value. Avarice
is (oftener than we might at first suspect) only vanity in disguise. We
should not want fine clothes or fine houses, an equipage or
livery-servants, but for what others will think of us for having or
wanting them. The chief and most expensive commodity that money is laid
out in purchasing, is respect. Money, like other things, is worth no
more than it will fetch. It is a passport into society; but if other
things will answer the same purpose, as beauty, birth, wit, learning,
desert in art or arms, dress, behaviour, the want of wealth is not felt
as a very severe privation. If a man, who, on whatever pretensions is
received into good company, behaves with propriety, and converses
rationally, it is not inquired after he is gone, nor once thought of
while he is present, whether he is rich or poor. In the mixed
intercourse of private society every one finds his level, in proportion
as he can contribute to its amusement or information. It is even more so
in the general intercourse of the world, where a poet and a man of
genius (if extrinsic circumstances make any difference) is as much
courted and run after for being a common ploughman, as for being a peer
of the realm. Burns, had he been living, would have started fair with
Lord Byron in the race of popularity, and would not have lost it.
The temptation to men in public life to swerve from the path of duty,
less frequently arises from a sordid regard to their private interests,
than from an undue deference to popular applause. A want of political
principle is, in nine cases out of ten, a want of firmness of mind to
differ with those around us, and to stand the brunt of their avowed
hostility or secret calumnies.
‘But still the world and its dread laugh prevails!’
An honest man is one whose sense of right and wrong is stronger than his
anxiety that others should think or speak well of him. A man in the same
sense forfeits his character for political integrity, whose love of
truth truckles to his false shame and cringing complaisance, and who
tampers with his own convictions, that he may stand well with the world.
A man who sells his opinion merely to gain by his profligacy, is not a
man without public principle, but common honesty. He ranks in the same
class with a highwayman or a pickpocket.—It is true, interest and
opinion are in general linked together; but opinion flies before, and
interest comes limping after. As a woman first loses her virtue through
her heart, so the yielding patriot generally sacrifices his character to
his love of reputation.
It is usually opposed by those who make no distinction between the
highest point of integrity and the lowest mercenariness, that Mr. Burke
changed his principles to gain a pension: and that this was the
main-spring of his subsequent conduct. We do not think so; though this
may have been one motive, and a strong one to a needy and extravagant
man. But the pension which he received was something more than a mere
grant of money—it was a mark of royal favour, it was a tax upon public
opinion. If any thing were wanting to fix his veering loyalty, it was
the circumstance of the king’s having his ‘Reflections on the French
Revolution’ bound in morocco (not an unsuitable binding), and giving it
to all his particular friends, saying, ‘It was a book which every
gentleman ought to read!’ This praise would go as far with a vain man as
a pension with a needy one; and we may be sure, that if there were any
lurking seeds of a leaning to the popular side remaining in the author’s
breast, he would after this lose no time in rooting them out of the
soil, that his works might reflect the perfect image of his royal
master’s mind, and have no plebeian stains left to sully it. Kings are
great critics: they are the fountain of honour; the judges of merit.
After such an authority had pronounced it ‘a book which every gentleman
ought to read,’ what gentleman could refuse to read, or dare to differ
with it? With what feelings a privy-counsellor would open the leaves of
a book, which the king had had richly bound, and presented with his own
hand! How lords of the bed-chamber would wonder at the profound
arguments! How peeresses in their own right must simper over the
beautiful similes! How the judges must puzzle over it! How the bishops
would bless themselves at the number of fine things; and our great
classical scholars, Doctors Parr and Burney, sit down for the first time
in their lives to learn English, to write themselves into a bishopric!
Burke had long laboured hard to attain a doubtful pre-eminence. He had
worked his way into public notice by talents which were thought specious
rather than solid, and by sentiments which were obnoxious to some,
suspected by others. His connexions and his views were ambiguous. He
professedly espoused the cause of the people, and found it as hard to
defend himself against popular jealousy as ministerial resentment. He
saw court-lacqueys put over his head; and country squires elbowing him
aside. He was neither understood by friends nor enemies. He was opposed,
thwarted, cross-questioned, and obliged to present ‘a certificate of
merit’ (as he himself says) at every stage of his progress through life.
But the king’s having pronounced that ‘his book was one which every
gentleman ought to read,’ floated him at once out of the flats and
shallows in which his voyage of popularity had been bound, into the full
tide of court-favour; settled all doubts; smoothed all difficulties;
rubbed off old scores; made the crooked straight, and the rough
plain;—what was obscure, became profound;—what was extravagant, lofty;
every sentiment was liberality, every expression elegance: and from that
time to this, Burke has been the oracle of every dull venal pretender to
taste or wisdom. Those who had never heard of or despised him before,
now joined in his praise. He became a fashion; he passed into a proverb;
he was an idol in the eyes of his readers, as much as he could ever, in
the days of his youthful vanity, have been in his own; he was dazzled
with his own popularity; and all this was owing to the king. No wonder
he was delighted with the change, infatuated with it, infuriated! It was
better to him than four thousand pounds a-year for his own life, and
fifteen hundred a-year to his widow during the joint-lives of four other
persons. It was what all his life he had been aiming at.—‘Thou hast it
now, King, Cawdor, Glamis, all!’ It was what the nurses had prophecied
of him, and what the school-boy had dreamt; and that which is first, is
also last in our thoughts. It was this that tickled his vanity more than
his pension: it was this that raised his gratitude, that melted his
obdurate pride, that opened the sluices of his heart to the poison of
corruption, that exorcised the low, mechanic, vulgar, morose, sour
principles of liberty clean out of him, left his mind ‘swept and
garnished,’ parched and dry, fevered with revenge, bloated with
adulation; and made him as shameless and abandoned in sacrificing every
feeling of attachment or obligation to the people, as he had before been
bold and prodigal in heaping insult and contumely upon the throne. He
denounced his former principles, in the true spirit of an apostate, with
a fury equal to the petulant and dogmatical tone in which he had
asserted them; and then proceeded to abuse all those who doubted the
honesty or wisdom of this change of opinion. He, in short, looked upon
every man as his enemy who did not think ‘his book fit for a gentleman
to read’; and would willingly have committed every such presumptuous
sceptic to the flames for not bowing down in servile adoration before
this idol of his vanity and reputation. Hence the frantic philippics in
his latter revolutionary speeches and writings, and the alteration from
a severe and stately style of eloquence and reasoning in his earlier
compositions to the most laboured paradoxes and wildest declamation. We
do not mean to say that his latest works did not display the greatest
genius. His native talents blazed out, undisguised and unconfined in
them. _Indignatio facit versus._ Burke’s best Muse was his vanity or
spleen. He felt quite at home in giving vent to his personal spite and
venal malice. He pleaded his own cause and the cause of the passions
better and with more eloquence, than he ever pleaded the cause of truth
and justice. He felt the one rankling in his heart with all their heat
and fury; he only conceived the other with his understanding coldly and
circuitously.—The ‘Letters of William Burke’ give one, however, a low
idea of Burke’s honesty, even in a pecuniary point of view.—(See Barry’s
‘Life.’) He constantly tells Barry, as a source of consolation to his
friend, and a compliment to his brother, ‘that though his party had not
hitherto been successful, or had not considered him as they ought,
matters were not so bad with him but that he could still afford to be
honest, and not desert the cause.’ This is very suspicious. This
querulous tone of disappointment, and cockering up of his boasted
integrity, must have come from Burke himself; who would hardly have
expressed such a sentiment, if it had not been frequently in his
thoughts; or if he had not made out a previous debtor and creditor
account between preferment and honesty, as one of the regular principles
of his political creed.
The same narrow view of the subject, drawn from a supposition that
money, or interest in the grossest sense, is the only inducement to a
dereliction of principle or sinister conduct, has been applied to shew
the sincerity of the present laureate in his change of opinions; for it
was said that the paltry salary of 100_l._ a-year was not a sufficient
temptation to any man of common sense, and who had other means of
gaining an ample livelihood honourably, to give up his principles and
his party, unless he did so conscientiously. That is not the real
alternative of the case. It is not the hundred pounds salary; it is the
honour (some may think it a disgrace) conferred along with it, that
enhances the prize. ‘And with it words of so sweet breath composed, as
made the gift more rare.’[43] It is the introduction to Carlton-House,
the smile, the squeeze by the hand that awaits him there, ‘escap’d from
Pyrrho’s maze, and Epicurus’ sty.’ The being presented at court is worth
more than a hundred pounds a-year. A person with a hundred thousand
pounds a-year can only be presented at court, and would consider it the
greatest mortification to be shut out. It is the highest honour in the
land; and Mr. Southey, by accepting his place and discarding his
principles, receives that highest honour as a matter of course, in
addition to his salary and his butt of sack. He is ushered into the
royal presence as by a magic charm, the palace-gates fly open at the
sight of his laurel-crown, and he stands in the midst of ‘Britain’s
warriors, her statesman, and her fair,’ as if suddenly dropped from the
clouds. Is this nothing to a vain man? Is it nothing to the author of
‘Wat Tyler’ and ‘Joan of Arc’ to have those errors of his youth veiled
in the honours of his riper years? To fill the poetic throne of Dryden,
of Shadwell, of Cibber, and of Pye? To receive distinctions which
Spenser, Shakspeare, and Milton never received, and to chaunt to the
unaverted ear of sovereignty strains such as they never sung? To be seen
on each returning birth-day joining the bright throng, the lengthened
procession, gay, gilt, painted, coronetted, garlanded, that as it passes
to and from St. James’s, all London, in sunshine or in shower, pours out
to gaze at? We tremble for the consequences, should any thing happen to
disturb the Laureate in his dream of perfect felicity. Racine died
broken-hearted, because Louis XIV. frowned upon him as he passed; and
yet Racine was as great a poet and as pious a man as Mr. Southey.
To move in the highest circles, to be in favour at courts, to be
familiar with princes, is then an object of ambition, which may be
supposed to fascinate a less romantic mind than Mr. Southey’s, setting
the lucrativeness of his conversion out of the question. Many persons
have paid dear for this proud elevation, with bankrupt health and
beggared fortunes. How many are ready to do so still! Mr. Southey only
paid for it _with his opinion_; and some people think it as much as his
opinion was worth. Are we to suppose Mr. Southey’s vanity of so sordid a
kind, that it must be bribed by his avarice? Might not the Poet-laureate
be supposed to catch at a title or a blue ribbon, if it were offered
him, without a round salary attached to it?
Why do country gentlemen wish to get into parliament, but to be seen
there? Why do overgrown merchants and rich nabobs wish to sit there,
like so many overgrown school-boys? Look at the hundreds of thousands of
pounds squandered in contested elections? It is not ‘gain but glory’
that provokes the combatants. Do you suppose that these persons expect
to repay themselves by making a market of their constituents, and
selling their votes to the best bidder? No: but they wish to be thought
to have the greatest influence, the greatest number of friends and
adherents in their county; and they will pay any price for it. We put
into the lottery, indeed, in hopes of what we can get, but in the
lottery of life honour is the great prize. It is the opinion of the
people for which the candidate at an election contends; and on the same
principles he will barter the opinion of the people, their rights and
liberty, and his own independence and character, not for gold, but for
the friendship of a court-favourite. Not that gold has not its weight
too, for the great and powerful have that also to bestow:—it is true,
that
——‘In their Livery
Walk Crowns and Crownets, Realms and Islands
As Plates drop from their Pockets.’
But opinion is a still more insinuating and universal menstruum for
dissolving honesty. _That sweet smile that hangs on princes’ favours_ is
more effectual than even the favours themselves!
ON COURT INFLUENCE
(CONCLUDED)
‘To be honest as this world goes, is to be one man picked out of ten
thousand.’
_January 10, 1818._
We are all of us more or less the slaves of opinion. There is no one,
however mean or insignificant, whose approbation is altogether
indifferent to us; whose flattery does not please, whose contempt does
not mortify us. There is an atmosphere of this sort always about us,
from which we can no more withdraw ourselves than from the air we
breathe. But the air of a Court is the concentrated essence of the
opinion of the world. The atmosphere there is mephitic. It is subtle
poison, the least exhalation of which taints the vitals of its victims.
It is made up of servile adulation, of sneering compliments, of broken
promises, of smiling professions, of stifled opinions, of hollow thanks,
of folly and lies—
‘Soul-killing lies, and truths that work small good.’
It is infected with the breath of flatterers, and the thoughts of Kings!
Let us see how its influence descends:—from the King to the people, to
his Ministers first, from the Ministers to both Houses of Parliament,
from Lords to Ladies, from the Clergy to the Laity, from the high to the
low, from the rich to the poor, and ‘pierces through the body of the
city, country, court’—it is beauty, birth, wit, learning, riches,
numbers: it is fear and favour; it has all the splendour that can
seduce, all the power that can intimidate, all the interest that can
corrupt, on its side; so that the opinion of the King is the opinion of
the nation; and if that opinion is not a wise one, hangs like a
millstone round its neck, oppresses it like a nightmare, weighs upon it
like lead, makes truth a lie, right wrong, converts liberty into
slavery, peace into war, plenty to famine, turns the heads of a whole
people, and bows their bodies to the earth. ‘Whosoever shall stumble
against this stone, it shall bruise him: but whomsoever it falls upon,
it shall grind him to powder.’ The whisper of a King rounded in the ear
of a favourite is re-echoed back in speeches and votes of Parliament, in
addresses and resolutions from associations in town and country, drawls
from the pulpit, brawls from the bar, resounds like the thunder of a
people’s voice, roars in the cannon’s mouth, and disturbs the peace of
nations. The frown of monarchs is like the speck seen in the distant
horizon, which soon spreads and darkens the whole hemisphere. Who is
there in his senses that can withstand the gathering storm, or oppose
himself to this torrent of opinion setting in upon him from the throne
and absorbing by degrees every thing in its vortex—undermining every
principle of independence, confounding every distinction of the
understanding, and obliterating every trace of liberty? To argue against
it, is like arguing against the motion of the world with which we are
carried along: its influence is as powerful and as imperceptible. To
question it, is folly; to resist it, madness. To differ with the opinion
of a whole nation, seems as presumptuous as it is unwise: and yet the
very circumstance which makes it so uniform, is that which makes it
worth nothing. Authority is more absolute than reason. Truth curtesies
to power. No arguments could persuade ten millions of men in one country
to be all of one mind, and thirty millions in another country to be of
just the contrary one; but the word of a King does it! We do not like to
differ from the company we are in. How much more difficult is it to
brave the opinion of the world! No man likes to be frowned out of
society. No man likes to be without sympathy. He must be a proud man
indeed who can do without it; and proud men do not like to be made a
mark for ‘scorn to point his slow and moving finger at.’ No man likes to
be thought the enemy of his king and country, without just cause. No man
likes to be called a fool or a knave, merely because he is not a fool
and a knave. It is not desirable to have to answer arguments backed with
informations filed _ex officio_; it is not amusing to become a bye-word
with the mob. A nickname is _the hardest stone that the devil can throw
at a man_. It will knock down any man’s resolution. It will stagger his
reason. It will tame his pride. Fasten it upon any man, and he will try
to shake it off, at any rate, though he should part with honour and
honesty along with it. To be shut out from public praise or private
friendship, to be lampooned in newspapers or Anti-Jacobin reviews, to be
looked blank upon in company, is not ‘a consummation devoutly to be
wished.’ The unfavourable opinion of others gives you a bad opinion of
yourself or them: and neither of these conduces to persevering,
high-minded integrity. To wish to serve mankind, we should think well of
them. To be able to serve them, they should think well of us. To keep
well with the public, is not more necessary to a man’s private interest
than to his general utility. It is a hopeless task to be always striving
against the stream: it is a thankless one to be in a state of perpetual
litigation with the community. The situation of a strange dog in a
country town, barked at and worried by all the curs in the village, is
about as enviable as that of a person who affects singularity in
politics. What is a man to do who gets himself into this predicament, in
an age when patriotism is a misnomer in language, and public principle a
solecism in fact? If he cannot bring the world round to his opinion, he
must as a forlorn hope go over to theirs, and be content to be knave—or
nothing.
Such is the force of opinion, that we would undertake to drive a first
Minister from his place and out of the country, by merely being allowed
to hire a number of dirty boys to hoot him along the streets from his
own house to the treasury and from the treasury back again. How would a
certain distinguished character, remarkable for uniting the _suaviter in
modo_ with the _fortiter in re_, and who, with an invariable consistency
in his political principles, carries the easiness of his temper to a
degree of apparent _non-chalance_, bear to have a starling in his
neighbourhood taught to repeat nothing but Walcheren, or to ring the
changes in his ears upon the names of Castles, Oliver, and Reynolds? Can
we wonder then at the feats which such Ministers have performed with the
Attorney-General at their backs, and the country at their heels, in full
cry against every one who was not a creature of the Ministers,—for whose
morals they could not vouch as government-spies, or whose talents they
did not reward as government-critics?—Mr. Coleridge, in his Literary
Biography, lately published, complains with pathetic bitterness of the
wanton and wilful slanders formerly circulated with so much zeal in the
Anti-Jacobin against himself, Mr. Southey, and his other poetical
friends, merely for a difference of political opinion; and he
significantly assigns these slanders as the reason why himself and his
friends remained so long adverse to the party who were the authors of
them! We will venture to go a little further, and say, that they were
not only the reason of their long estrangement from the Court-party, but
of their final reconciliation to it. They had time to balance and
reflect, and to make a choice of evils—they deliberated between the loss
of principle and of character, and they were undone. They thought it
better to be the accomplices of venality and corruption than the mark
for them to shoot their arrows at: they took shelter from the abuse by
joining in the cry. Mr. Southey says that he has not changed his
principles, but that circumstances have changed, and that he has grown
wiser from the events of five-and-twenty years. How is it that his
present friend and associate in the Quarterly Review, who was formerly a
contributor to the Beauties of the Anti-Jacobin, has not changed too?
The world has gone round in his time too, but he remains firm to his
first principles. He worships the sun wherever he sees it. Court-favour,
‘the cynosure of longing eyes,’ sheds a more steady influence on its
votaries than vague popularity. The confined, artificial air of a Court
has a wonderful effect in stopping that progress of the mind with the
march of events, of which Mr. Southey boasts, and prematurely fixes the
volatility of genius in a _caput mortuum_ of prejudice and servility, in
those who are admitted within the magic circle! The Anti-Jacobin poet
and orator, Mr. Canning, has not become a renegado to the opinions of
the Court: the Jacobin poet and prose-writer, Mr. Southey, has become a
renegado to his own.—In an article in the Quarterly Review (some months
back) there was an argument to shew that the late war against France was
all along the undoubted result of popular opinion, ‘because from the
first party-spirit ran so high upon this subject, that any one who
expressed an opinion against it did so at the hazard of his reputation,
fortune, or even life.’ The author of this singular argument, we
believe, was one of those, who did not at the critical period here
alluded to approve of it, and who has since become a convert to its
justice and humanity. His own statement may account for his change of
opinion. What a pity for a man to hazard his life and fortune in a cause
by maintaining an opinion, and to lose his character afterwards by
relinquishing it. The present Poet-laureate has missed indeed the crown
of martyrdom, and has gained a crown of laurel in its stead!
The same consistent writers, and friends of civil and religious liberty,
who are delighted with the restoration of the Bourbons, of the Pope, and
the Inquisition, have lately made an attempt to run down the Dissenters
in this country; and in this they are right. They dwell with fondness on
‘the single-heartedness of the Spanish nation,’ who are slaves and
bigots to a man, and scoff at the Presbyterians and Independents of this
country (who ousted Popery and slavery at the Revolution, and who had a
main hand in placing and continuing the present family on the throne) as
but half-Englishmen, and as equally disaffected to Church and State.
There is some ground for the antipathy of our political changelings to a
respectable, useful, and conscientious body of men: and we will here, in
discharge of an old debt, say what this ground is. If it were only meant
that the Dissenters are but half Englishmen, because they are not
professed slaves—that they are disaffected to the Constitution in Church
and State, because they are not prepared to go all the lengths of
despotism and intolerance under a Protestant hierarchy and
Constitutional King, which they resisted ‘at the peril of their
characters, their fortunes, and their lives,’ under a persecuting
priesthood and an hereditary Pretender, this would be well: but there is
more in it than this. Our sciolists would persuade us that the different
sects are hot-beds of sedition, because they are nurseries of public
spirit, and independence, and sincerity of opinion in all other
respects. They are so necessarily, and by the supposition. They are
Dissenters from the Established Church: they submit voluntarily to
certain privations, they incur a certain portion of obloquy and
ill-will, for the sake of what they believe to be the truth: they are
not time-servers on the face of the evidence, and that is sufficient to
expose them to the instinctive hatred and ready ribaldry of those who
think venality the first of virtues, and prostitution of principle the
best sacrifice a man can make to the Graces or his Country. The
Dissenter does not change his sentiments with the seasons: he does not
suit his conscience to his convenience. This is enough to condemn him
for a pestilent fellow. He will not give up his principles because they
are unfashionable, therefore he is not to be trusted. He speaks his mind
bluntly and honestly, therefore he is a secret disturber of the peace, a
dark conspirator against the State. On the contrary, the different sects
in this country are, or have been, the steadiest supporters of its
liberties and laws: they are checks and barriers against the insidious
or avowed encroachments of arbitrary power, as effectual and
indispensable as any others in the Constitution: they are depositaries
of a principle as sacred and somewhat rarer than a devotion to
Court-influence—we mean the love of truth. It is hard for any one to be
an honest politician who is not born and bred a Dissenter. Nothing else
can sufficiently inure and steel a man against the prevailing prejudices
of the world, but that habit of mind which arises from non-conformity to
its decisions in matters of religion. There is a natural alliance
between the love of civil and religious liberty, as much as between
Church and State. Protestantism was the first school of political
liberty in Europe: Presbyterianism has been one great support of it in
England. The sectary in religion is taught to appeal to his own bosom
for the truth and sincerity of his opinions, and to arm himself with
stern indifference to what others think of them. This will no doubt
often produce a certain hardness of manner and cold repulsiveness of
feeling in trifling matters, but it is the only sound discipline of
truth, or inflexible honesty in politics as well as in religion. The
same principle of independent inquiry and unbiassed conviction which
makes him reject all undue interference between his Maker and his
conscience, will give a character of uprightness and disregard of
personal consequences to his conduct and sentiments in what concerns the
most important relations between man and man. He neither subscribes to
the dogmas of priests, nor truckles to the mandates of Ministers. He has
a rigid sense of duty which renders him superior to the caprice, the
prejudices, and the injustice of the world; and the same habitual
consciousness of rectitude of purpose, which leads him to rely for his
self-respect on the testimony of his own heart, enables him to disregard
the groundless malice and rash judgments of his opponents. It is in vain
for him to pay his court to the world, to fawn upon power; he labours
under certain insurmountable disabilities for becoming a candidate for
its favour: he dares to contradict its opinion and to condemn its usages
in the most important article of all. The world will always look cold
and askance upon him; and therefore he may defy it with less fear of its
censures. The Presbyterian is said to be sour: he is not therefore
over-complaisant—
‘Or if severe in thought,
‘The love he bears to virtue is in fault.’
Dissenters are the safest partizans, and the steadiest friends. Indeed
they are almost the only people who have an idea of an abstract
attachment to a cause or to individuals, from a sense of fidelity,
independently of prosperous or adverse circumstances, and in spite of
opposition. No patriotism, no public spirit, not reared in that
inclement sky and harsh soil, in ‘the _hortus siccus_ of dissent,’ will
generally last: it will either bend in the storm or droop in the
sunshine. _Non ex quovis ligno fit Mercurius._ You cannot engraft a
medlar on a crab-apple. A thorough-bred Dissenter will never make an
accomplished Courtier. The antithesis of a Presbyterian Divine of the
old school is the Poet-laureate of the new. We have known instances of
both; and give it decidedly in favour of old-fashioned honesty over
new-fangled policy.
We have known instances of both. The one we would willingly forget; the
others we hope never to forget, nor can we ever. A Poet-laureate is an
excrescence even in a Court; he is doubly nugatory as a Courtier and a
Poet; he is a refinement upon insignificance, and a superfluous piece of
supererogation. But a Dissenting Minister is a character not so easily
to be dispensed with, and whose place cannot well be supplied. It is the
fault of sectarianism that it tends to scepticism; and so relaxes the
springs of moral courage and patience into levity and indifference. The
prospect of future rewards and punishments is a useful set-off against
the immediate distribution of places and pensions; the anticipations of
faith call off our attention from the grosser illusions of sense. It is
a pity that this character has worn itself out; that that pulse of
thought and feeling has ceased almost to beat in the heart of a nation,
who, if not remarkable for sincerity and plain downright well-meaning,
are remarkable for nothing. But we have known some such, in happier
days; who had been brought up and lived from youth to age in the one
constant belief of God and of his Christ, and who thought all other
things but dross compared with the glory hereafter to be revealed. Their
youthful hopes and vanity had been mortified in them, even in their
boyish days, by the neglect and supercilious regards of the world; and
they turned to look into their own minds for something else to build
their hopes and confidence upon. They were true Priests. They set up an
image in their own minds, it was truth: they worshipped an idol there,
it was justice. They looked on man as their brother, and only bowed the
knee to the Highest. Separate from the world, they walked humbly with
their God, and lived in thought with those who had borne testimony of a
good conscience, with the spirits of just men in all ages. They saw
Moses when he slew the Egyptian, and the Prophets who overturned the
brazen images; and those who were stoned and sawn asunder. They were
with Daniel in the lions’ den, and with the three children who passed
through the fiery furnace, Meshech, Shadrach, and Abednego; they did not
crucify Christ twice over, or deny him in their hearts, with St. Peter;
the Book of Martyrs was open to them; they read the story of William
Tell, of John Huss and Jerome of Prague, and the old one-eyed Zisca;
they had Neale’s History of the Puritans by heart, and Calamy’s Account
of the Two Thousand Ejected Ministers, and gave it to their children to
read, with the pictures of the polemical Baxter, the silver-tongued
Bates, the mild-looking Calamy, and old honest Howe; they believed in
Lardner’s Credibility of the Gospel History: they were deep-read in the
works of the _Fratres Poloni_, Pripscovius, Crellius, Cracovius, who
sought out truth in texts of Scripture, and grew blind over Hebrew
points; their aspiration after liberty was a sigh uttered from the
towers, ‘time-rent,’ of the Holy Inquisition; and their zeal for
religious toleration was kindled at the fires of Smithfield. Their
sympathy was not with the oppressors, but the oppressed. They cherished
in their thoughts—and wished to transmit to their posterity—those rights
and privileges for asserting which their ancestors had bled on
scaffolds, or had pined in dungeons, or in foreign climes. Their creed
too was ‘Glory to God, peace on earth, good will to man.’ This creed,
since profaned and rendered vile, they kept fast through good report and
evil report. This belief they had, that looks at something out of
itself, fixed as the stars, deep as the firmament, that makes of its own
heart an altar to truth, a place of worship for what is right, at which
it does reverence with praise and prayer like a holy thing, apart and
content: that feels that the greatest being in the universe is always
near it, and that all things work together for the good of his
creatures, under his guiding hand. This covenant they kept, as the stars
keep their courses: this principle they stuck by, for want of knowing
better, as it sticks by them to the last. It grew with their growth, it
does not wither in their decay. It lives when the almond-tree
flourishes, and is not bowed down with the tottering knees. It glimmers
with the last feeble eyesight, smiles in the faded cheek like infancy,
and lights a path before them to the grave!—This is better than the life
of a whirligig Court poet.
ON THE CLERICAL CHARACTER
——‘Now mark a spot or two,
Which so much virtue would do well to clear.’—COWPER.
_Jan. 24, 1818._
The clerical character has, no doubt, its excellences, which have been
often insisted on: it has also its faults, which cannot be corrected or
guarded against, unless they are pointed out. The following are some of
them.
The first, and most obvious objection we have to it, arises from the
dress. All artificial distinctions of this kind have a tendency to warp
the understanding and sophisticate the character. They create egotism. A
man is led to think of himself more than he should, who by any outward
marks of distinction invites others to fix their attention on him. They
create affectation; for they make him study to be not like himself, but
like his dress. They create hypocrisy; for as his thoughts and feelings
cannot be as uniform and mechanical as his dress, he must be constantly
tempted to make use of the one as a cloak to the other, and to conceal
the defects or aberrations of his mind by a greater primness of
professional costume, or a more mysterious carriage of his person—
——‘And in Franciscan think to pass disguised.’
No man of the ordinary stamp can retain a downright unaffected
simplicity of character who is always reminding others, and reminded
himself, of his pretensions to superior piety and virtue by a
conventional badge, which implies neither one nor the other, and which
must gradually accustom the mind to compromise appearances for reality,
the form for the power of godliness. We do not care to meet the Lawyers
fluttering about Chancery-lane in their full-bottomed wigs and loose
silk gowns: their dress seems to sit as loose upon them as their
opinions, and they wear their own hair under the well-powdered dangling
curls, as they bury the sense of right and wrong under the intricate and
circuitous forms of law: but we hate much more to meet a three-cornered
well-pinched clerical hat on a prim expectant pair of shoulders, that
seems to announce to half a street before it, that sees the theological
puppet coming, with a mingled air of humility and self-conceit—‘Stand
off, for I am holier than you.’ We are not disposed to submit to this
pharisaical appeal; we are more inclined to resent than to sympathise
with the claims to our respect, which are thus mechanically perked in
our faces. The dress of the bar merely implies a professional
indifference to truth or falsehood in those who wear it, and they seldom
carry it out of Court: the dress of the pulpit implies a greater gravity
of pretension; and they therefore stick to it as closely as to a doublet
and hose of religion and morality. If the reverend persons who are thus
clothed with righteousness as with a garment, are sincere in their
professions, it is well: if they are hypocrites, it is also well. It is
no wonder that the class of persons so privileged are tenacious of the
respect that is paid to the cloth; that their tenderness on this subject
is strengthened by all the incentives of self-love; by the _esprit de
corps_; by the indirect implication of religion itself in any slight put
upon its authorised Ministers; and that the deliberate refusal to
acknowledge the gratuitous claims which are thus set up to our blind
homage, is treated as a high offence against the good order of society
in the present world, and threatened with exemplary punishment in the
next. There is nothing fair or manly in all this. It is levying a tax on
our respect under fraudulent, or at best, equivocal pretences. There is
no manner of connexion between the thing and the symbol of it, to which
public opinion is expected to bow. The whole is an affair of dress—a
dull masquerade. There is no proof of the doctrine of the Trinity in a
three-cornered hat, nor does a black coat without a cape imply sincerity
and candour. A man who wishes to pass for a saint or a philosopher on
the strength of a button in his hat or a buckle in his shoes, is not
very likely to be either; as the button in the hat or the buckle in the
shoes will answer all the same purpose with the vulgar, and save time
and trouble. Those who make their dress a principal part of themselves,
will, in general, become of no more value than their dress. Their
understandings will receive a costume. Their notions will be as stiff
and starched as their bands; their morals strait-laced and ricketty;
their pretended creed formal and out of date; and they themselves a sort
of demure lay-figures, sombre Jacks-of-the-Green, to carry about the
tattered fragments and hoarded relics of bigotry and superstition,
which, when they no longer awe the imagination or impose on credulity,
only insult the understanding and excite contempt.—No one who expects
you to pay the same regard to the cut or colour of his coat as to what
he says or does, will be anxious to set an exclusive value on what can
alone entitle him to respect. You are to take his merit for granted on
the score of civility, and he will take it for granted himself on the
score of convenience. He will do all he can to keep up the farce. These
gentlemen find it no hardship
‘To counterfeiten chere
Of court, and ben estatelich of manere,
And to ben holden digne of reverence.’
On the contrary, if you offer to withhold it from them,
‘Certain so wroth are they,
That they are out of all charity.’
This canonical standard of moral estimation is too flattering to their
pride and indolence to be parted with in a hurry; and nothing will try
their patience or provoke their humility so much as to suppose that
there is any truer stamp of merit than the badge of their profession. It
has been contended, that more is made here of the clerical dress than it
is meant to imply; that it is simply a mark of distinction, to know the
individuals of that particular class of society from others, and that
they ought to be charged with affectation, or an assumption of
self-importance for wearing it, no more than a waterman, a fireman, or a
chimney-sweeper, for appearing in the streets in their appropriate
costume. We do not think ‘the collusion holds in the exchange.’ If a
chimney-sweeper were to jostle a spruce divine in the street, which of
them would ejaculate the word ‘Fellow’? The humility of the churchman
would induce him to lift up his cane at the sooty professor, but the
latter would hardly take his revenge by raising his brush and shovel, as
equally respectable insignia of office. As to the watermen and firemen,
they do not, by the badges of their trade, claim any particular
precedence in moral accomplishments, nor are their jacket and trowsers
hieroglyphics of any particular creed, which others are bound to believe
on pain of damnation. It is there the shoe pinches. Where external dress
really denotes distinction of rank in other cases, as in the dress of
officers in the army, those who might avail themselves of this
distinction lay it aside as soon as possible; and, unless very silly
fellows or very great coxcombs, do not choose to be made a gazing-stock
to women and children. But there is in the clerical habit something too
sacred to be lightly put on or off: _once a priest, and always a
priest_: it adheres to them as a part of their function; it is the
outward and visible sign of an inward and invisible grace; it is a light
that must not be hid; it is a symbol of godliness, an edifying
spectacle, an incentive to good morals, a discipline of humanity, and a
_memento mori_, which cannot be too often before us. To lay aside their
habit, would be an unworthy compromise of the interests of both worlds.
It would be a sort of denying Christ. They therefore venture out into
the streets with this gratuitous obtrusion of opinion and unwarrantable
assumption of character wrapped about them, ticketted and labelled with
the Thirty-nine Articles, St. Athanasius’s Creed, and the Ten
Commandments,—with the Cardinal Virtues and the Apostolic Faith sticking
out of every corner of their dress, and angling for the applause or
contempt of the multitude. A full-dressed ecclesiastic is a sort of
go-cart of divinity; an ethical automaton. A clerical prig is, in
general, a very dangerous as well as contemptible character. The utmost
that those who thus habitually confound their opinions and sentiments
with the outside coverings of their bodies can aspire to, is a negative
and neutral character, like wax-work figures, where the dress is done as
much to the life as the man, and where both are respectable pieces of
pasteboard, or harmless compositions of fleecy hosiery.
The bane of all religions has been the necessity (real or supposed) of
keeping up an attention and attaching a value to external forms and
ceremonies. It was, of course, much easier to conform to these, or to
manifest a reverence for them, than to practise the virtues or
understand the doctrines of true religion, of which they were merely the
outward types and symbols. The consequence has been, that the greatest
stress has been perpetually laid on what was of the least value, and
most easily professed. The form of religion has superseded the
substance; the means have supplanted the end; and the sterling coin of
charity and good works has been driven out of the currency, for the base
counterfeits of superstition and intolerance, by all the money-changers
and dealers in the temples established to religion throughout the world.
Vestments and chalices have been multiplied for the reception of the
Holy Spirit; the tagged points of controversy and lackered varnish of
hypocrisy have eaten into the solid substance and texture of piety; ‘and
all the inward acts of worship, issuing from the native strength of the
soul, run out (as Milton expresses it) lavishly to the upper skin, and
there harden into the crust of formality.’ Hence we have had such shoals
of
‘Eremites and friars,
White, black, and grey, with all their trumpery’—
who have foisted their ‘idiot and embryo’ inventions upon us for truth,
and who have fomented all the bad passions of the heart, and let loose
all the mischiefs of war, of fire, and famine, to avenge the slightest
difference of opinion on any one iota of their lying creeds, or the
slightest disrespect to any one of those mummeries and idle pageants
which they had set up as sacred idols for the world to wonder at. We do
not forget, in making these remarks, that there was a time when the
persons who will be most annoyed and scandalized at them, would have
taken a more effectual mode of shewing their zeal and indignation; when
to have expressed a free opinion on a Monk’s cowl or a Cardinal’s hat,
would have exposed the writer who had been guilty of such sacrilege, to
the pains and penalties of excommunication; to be burnt at an _auto da
fe_; to be consigned to the dungeons of the Inquisition, or doomed to
the mines of Spanish America; to have his nose slit, or his ears cut
off, or his hand reduced to a stump. Such were the considerate and
humane proceedings by which the Priests of former times vindicated their
own honour, which they pretended to be the honour of God. Such was their
humility, when they had the power. Will they complain now, if we only
criticise the colour of a coat, or smile at the circumference of a
Doctor of Divinity’s wig, since we can do it with impunity? We cry them
mercy!
ON THE CLERICAL CHARACTER
——‘Now mark a spot or two,
Which so much virtue would do well to clear.’—COWPER
(CONTINUED.)
_Jan. 31, 1818._
Many people seem to think, that the restraints imposed on the Clergy by
the nature of their profession, take away from them, by degrees, all
temptations to violate the limits of duty, and that the character grows
to the cloth. We are afraid that this is not altogether the case.
How little can be done in the way of extracting virtues or intellect
from a piece of broad-cloth or a beaver hat, we have an instance in the
Quakers, who are the most remarkable, and the most unexceptionable class
of professors in this kind. They bear the same relation to genuine
characters, not brought up in the trammels of dress and custom, that a
clipped yew-tree, cut into the form of a peacock or an armchair, does to
the natural growth of a tree in the forest, left to its own energies and
luxuriance. The Quakers are docked into form, but they have no spirit
left. They are without ideas, except in trade; without vices or virtues,
unless we admit among the latter those which we give as a character to
servants when we turn them away, viz. ‘that they are cleanly, sober, and
honest.’ The Quaker is, in short, a negative character, but it is the
best that can be formed in this mechanical way. The Priest is not a
negative character; he is something positive and disagreeable. He is
not, like the Quaker, distinguished from others merely by singularity of
dress and manner, but he is distinguished from others by pretensions to
superiority over them. His faults arise from his boasted exemption from
the opposite vices; and he has one vice running through all his
others—hypocrisy. He is proud, with an affectation of humility;
bigotted, from a pretended zeal for truth; greedy, with an ostentation
of entire contempt for the things of this world; professing self-denial,
and always thinking of self-gratification; censorious, and blind to his
own faults; intolerant, unrelenting, impatient of opposition, insolent
to those below, and cringing to those above him, with nothing but
Christian meekness and brotherly love in his mouth. He thinks more of
external appearances than of his internal convictions. He is tied down
to the opinions and prejudices of the world in every way. The motives of
the heart are clogged and checked at the outset, by the fear of idle
censure; his understanding is the slave of established creeds and
formulas of faith. He can neither act, feel, or think for himself, or
from genuine impulse. He plays a part through life. He is an actor upon
a stage. The public are a spy upon him, and he wears a mask the better
to deceive them. If in this sort of theatrical assumption of character
he makes one false step, it may be fatal to him, and he is induced to
have recourse to the most unmanly arts to conceal it, if possible. As he
cannot be armed at all points against the flesh and the devil, he takes
refuge in self-delusion and mental imposture; learns to play at fast and
loose with his own conscience, and to baffle the vigilance of the public
by dexterous equivocations; sails as near the wind as he can, shuffles
with principle, is punctilious in matters of form, and tries to
reconcile the greatest strictness of decorum and regularity of demeanour
with the least possible sacrifice of his own interest or appetites.
Parsons are not drunkards, because it is a vice that is easily detected
and immediately offensive; but they are great eaters, which is no less
injurious to the health and intellect. They indulge in all the
sensuality that is not prohibited in the Decalogue: they monopolize
every convenience they can lay lawful hands on: and consider themselves
as the peculiar favourites of Heaven, and the rightful inheritors of the
earth. They are on a short allowance of sin; and are only the more eager
to catch at all the stray bits and nice morsels they can meet. They are
always considering how they shall indemnify themselves in smaller
things, for their grudging self-denial in greater ones. Satan lies in
wait for them in a pinch of snuff, in a plate of buttered toast, or the
kidney end of a loin of veal. They lead their cooks the devil of a life.
Their dinner is the principal event of the day. They say a long grace
over it, partly to prolong the pleasure of expectation, and to keep
others waiting. They are appealed to as the most competent judges, as
arbiters _deliciarum_ in all questions of the palate. Their whole
thoughts are taken up in pampering the flesh, and comforting the spirit
with all the little debasing luxuries which do not come under the
sentence of damnation, or breed scandal in the parish. You find out
their true character in those of them who have quitted the cloth, and
think it no longer necessary to practise the same caution or disguise.
You there find the dogmatism of the divine ingrafted on the most lax
speculations of the philosophical freethinker, and the most romantic
professions of universal benevolence made a cover to the most unfeeling
and unblushing spirit of selfishness. The mask is taken off, but the
character was the same under a more jealous attention to appearances.
With respect to one vice from which the Clergy are bound to keep
themselves clear, St. Paul has observed, that _it is better to marry
than burn_. ‘Continents,’ says Hobbes, ‘have more of what they contain
than other things.’ The Clergy are men: and many of them, who keep a
sufficient guard over their conduct, are too apt, from a common law of
our nature, to let their thoughts and desires wander to forbidden
ground. This is not so well. It is not so well to be always thinking of
the peccadillos they cannot commit: to be hankering after the fleshpots
of Egypt: to have the charms of illicit gratification enhanced by
privations, to which others are not liable; to have the fancy always
prurient, and the imagination always taking a direction which they
themselves cannot follow.
‘Where’s that palace, whereunto foul things
Sometimes intrude not? Who has that breast so pure,
But some uncleanly apprehensions
Keep leets and law-days, and in Sessions sit
With meditations lawful?’
But the mind of the Divine and Moralist by profession is a sort of
sanctuary for such thoughts. He is bound by his office to be always
detecting and pointing out abuses, to describe and conceive of them in
the strongest colours, to denounce and to abhor vice in others, to be
familiar with the diseases of the mind, as the physician is with those
of the body. But that this sort of speculative familiarity with vice
leads to a proportionable disgust at it, may be made a question. The
virtue of prudes has been thought doubtful: the morality of priests,
even of those who lead the most regular lives, is not, perhaps, always
‘pure in the last recesses of the mind.’ They are obliged, as it were,
to have the odious nature of sin habitually in their thoughts, and in
their mouths; to wink, to make wry faces at it, to keep themselves in a
state of incessant indignation against it. It is like living next door
to a brothel, a situation which produces a great degree of irritation
against vice, and an eloquent abuse of those who are known to practise
it, but is not equally favourable to the growth and cultivation of
sentiments of virtue. To keep theoretical watch and ward over vice, to
be systematic spies and informers against immorality, ‘while _they_ the
supervisors grossly gape on,’ is hardly decent. It is almost as bad as
belonging to the Society for the Suppression of Vice—a Society which
appears to have had its origin in much the same feeling as the monkish
practice of auricular confession in former times.—Persons who undertake
to pry into, or cleanse out all the filth of a common sewer, either
cannot have very nice noses, or will soon lose them. Swift used to say,
that people of the nicest imaginations have the dirtiest ideas. The
virtues of the priesthood are not the virtues of humanity. They are not
honest, cordial, unaffected, and sincere. They are the mask, not the
man. There is always the feeling of something hollow, assuming, and
disagreeable, in them. There is something in the profession that does
not sit easy on the imagination. You are not at home with it. Do you, or
do you not, seek the society of a man for being a Parson? You would as
soon think of marrying a woman for being an old maid!
To proceed to what we at first proposed, which was a consideration of
the Clerical Character, less in connexion with private morality than
with public principle. We have already spoken of the Dissenting Clergy
as, in this respect, an honest and exemplary body of men. They are so by
the supposition, in what relates to matters of opinion. The Established
Clergy of any religion certainly are not so, by the same self-evident
rule; on the contrary, they are bound to conform their professions of
religious belief to a certain popular and lucrative standard, and bound
over to keep the peace by certain articles of faith. It is a rare
felicity in any one who gives his attention fairly and freely to the
subject, and has read the Scriptures, the Misnah, and the Talmud—the
Fathers, the Schoolmen, the Socinian Divines, the Lutheran and
Calvinistic controversy, with innumerable volumes appertaining thereto
and illustrative thereof, to believe all the Thirty-nine Articles,
‘except one.’ If those who are destined for the episcopal office
exercise their understandings honestly and openly upon every one of
these questions, how little chance is there that they should come to the
same conclusion upon them all? If they do not inquire, what becomes of
their independence of understanding? If they conform to what they do not
believe, what becomes of their honesty? Their estimation in the world,
as well as their livelihood, depends on their tamely submitting their
understanding to authority at first, and on their not seeing reason to
alter their opinion afterwards. Is it likely that a man will intrepidly
open his eyes to conviction, when he sees poverty and disgrace staring
him in the face as the inevitable consequence? Is it likely, after the
labours of a whole life of servility and cowardice—after repeating daily
what he does not understand, and what those who require him to repeat it
do not believe, or pretend to believe, and impose on others only as a
ready test of insincerity, and a compendious shibboleth of want of
principle: after doing morning and evening service to the God of this
world—after keeping his lips sealed against the indiscreet mention of
the plainest truths, and opening them only to utter mental
reservations—after breakfasting, dining, and supping, waking and
sleeping, being clothed and fed, upon a collusion,—after saying a double
grace and washing his hands after dinner, and preparing for a course of
smutty jests to make himself good company,—after nodding to Deans,
bowing to Bishops, waiting upon Lords, following in the train of Heads
of Colleges, watching the gracious eye of those who have presentations
in their gift, and the lank cheek of those who are their present
incumbents,—after finding favour, patronage, promotion, prizes, praise,
promises, smiles, squeezes of the hand, invitations to tea and cards
with the ladies, the epithets, ‘a charming man,’ ‘an agreeable
creature,’ ‘a most respectable character,’ the certainty of reward, and
the hopes of glory, always proportioned to the systematic baseness of
his compliance with the will of his superiors, and the sacrifice of
every particle of independence, or pretence to manly spirit and honesty
of character,—is it likely, that a man so tutored and trammelled, and
inured to be his own dupe, and the tool of others, will ever, in one
instance out of thousands, attempt to burst the cobweb fetters which
bind him in the magic circle of contradictions and enigmas, or risk the
independence of his fortune for the independence of his mind?
_Principle_ is a word that is not to be found in the Young Clergyman’s
Best Companion: it is a thing he has no idea of, except as something
pragmatical, sour, puritanical, and Presbyterian. To oblige is his
object, not to offend. He wishes ‘to be conformed to this world, rather
than transformed.’ He expects one day to be a Court-divine, a dignitary
of the Church, an ornament to the State; and he knows all the texts of
Scripture, which, tacked to a visitation, an assize, or
corporation-dinner sermon, will float him gently, ‘like little wanton
boys that swim on bladders,’ up to the palace at Lambeth. A hungry poet,
gaping for solid pudding or empty praise, may easily be supposed to set
about a conscientious revision and change of his unpopular opinions,
from the reasonable prospect of a place or pension, and to eat his words
the less scrupulously, the longer he has had nothing else to eat. A
snug, promising, soft, smiling, orthodox Divine, who has a living
attached to the cure of souls, and whose sentiments are beneficed, who
has a critical _bonus_ for finding out that all the books he cannot
understand are written against the Christian Religion, and founds the
doctrine of the Trinity, and his hopes of a Bishopric, on the ignorant
construction of a Greek particle, cannot be expected to change the
opinions to which he has formerly subscribed his belief, with the
revolutions of the sun or the changes of the moon. His political, as
well as religious creed, is installed in hopes, pampered in
expectations; and the longer he winks and shuts his eyes and holds them
close, catching only under their drooping lids ‘glimpses that may make
him less forlorn,’ day-dreams of lawn-sleeves, and nightly beatific
visions of episcopal mitres, the less disposed will he be to open them
to the broad light of reason, or to forsake the primrose path of
preferment, to tear and mangle his sleek tender-skinned conscience,
dipped and softened in the milk-bath of clerical complaisance, among the
thorns and briars of controversial divinity, or to get out on the other
side upon a dark and dreary waste, amidst a crew of hereticks and
schismatics, and Unitarian dealers in ‘potential infidelity’—
‘Who far from steeples and their sacred sound,
In fields their sullen conventicles found.’
This were too much to expect from the chaplain of an Archbishop.
Take one illustration of the truth of all that has been here said, and
of more that might be said upon the subject. It is related in that
valuable comment on the present reign and the existing order of things,
Bishop Watson’s Life, that the late Dr. Paley having at one time to
maintain a thesis in the University, proposed to the Bishop, for his
approbation, the following:—‘That the eternity of Hell torments is
contradictory to the goodness of God.’ The Bishop observed, that he
thought this a bold doctrine to maintain in the face of the Church; but
Paley persisted in his determination. Soon after, however, having
sounded the opinions of certain persons, high in authority, and well
read in the orthodoxy of preferment, he came back in great alarm, said
he found the thing would not do, and begged, instead of his first
thesis, to have the reverse one substituted in its stead, _viz._—‘That
the Eternity of Hell torments is not contradictory to the goodness of
God.’—What burning day-light is here thrown on clerical discipline, and
the bias of a University education! This passage is worth all Mosheim’s
Ecclesiastical History, Wood’s Athenæ Oxonienses, and Mr. Coleridge’s
two Lay Sermons. This same shuffling Divine is the same Dr. Paley, who
afterwards employed the whole of his life, and his moderate second-hand
abilities, in tampering with religion, morality, and politics,—in
trimming between his convenience and his conscience,—in crawling between
heaven and earth, and trying to cajole both. His celebrated and popular
work on Moral Philosophy, is celebrated and popular for no other reason,
than that it is a somewhat ingenious and amusing apology for existing
abuses of every description, by which any thing is to be got. It is a
very elaborate and consolatory elucidation of the text, _that men should
not quarrel with their bread and butter_. It is not an attempt to show
what is right, but to palliate and find out plausible excuses for what
is wrong. It is a work without the least value, except as a convenient
common-place book or _vade mecum_, for tyro politicians and young
divines, to smooth their progress in the Church or the State. This work
is a text-book in the University: its morality is the acknowledged
morality of the House of Commons. The Lords are above it. They do not
affect that sort of casuistry, by which the country gentlemen contrive
to oblige the Ministers, and to reconcile themselves to their
constituents.
ON THE CLERICAL CHARACTER
‘Priests were the first deluders of mankind,
Who with vain faith made all their reason blind;
Not Lucifer himself more proud than they,
And yet persuade the world they must obey;
Of avarice and luxury complain,
And practise all the vices they arraign.
Riches and honour they from laymen reap,
And with dull _crambo_ feed the silly sheep.
As Killigrew buffoons his master, they
Droll on their god, but a much duller way.
With hocus pocus, and their heavenly light,
They gain on tender consciences at night.
Whoever has an over zealous wife,
Becomes the priest’s Amphitrio during life.’
_Marvel’s State Poems._
(CONCLUDED)
_February 7, 1818._
This then is the secret of the alliance between Church and State—make a
man a tool and a hypocrite in one respect and he will make himself a
slave and a pander in every other, that you can make it worth his while.
Those who make a regular traffic of their belief in religion, will not
be backward to compromise their sentiments in what relates to the
concerns between man and man. He who is in the habit of affronting his
Maker with solemn mockeries of faith, as the means of a creditable
livelihood, will not bear the testimony of a good conscience before men,
if he finds it a losing concern. The principle of integrity is gone; the
patriotism of the religious sycophant is rotten at the core. Hence we
find that the Established Clergy of all religions have been the most
devoted tools of power. Priestcraft and Despotism have gone hand in
hand—have stood and fallen together. It is this that makes them so fond
and loving; so pious and so loyal; so ready to play the Court-game into
one another’s hands, and so firmly knit and leagued together against the
rights and liberties of mankind. Thus Mr. Southey sings in laureat
strains:—
‘One fate attends the altar and the throne.’
Yet the same peremptory versifier qualifies the Church of Rome with the
epithets of ‘that Harlot old,—
‘The same that is, that was, and is to be,’—
without giving us to understand whether in Popish countries, the best
and most ‘single-hearted’ portion of Europe, the same lofty and
abstracted doctrine holds good. This uncivil laureat has indeed gone so
far in one of his ‘songs of delight and rustical roundelays,’ as to give
the Princess Charlotte the following critical advice:—
‘Bear thou that great Eliza in thy mind,
Who from a wreck this fabric edified,
AND HER WHO, TO A NATION’S VOICE RESIGNED,
WHEN ROME IN HOPE HER WILIEST ENGINES PLIED,
BY HER OWN HEART AND RIGHTEOUS HEAV’N APPROVED,
STOOD UP AGAINST THE FATHER WHOM SHE LOV’D.’
These lines seem to glance at contingent rebellion, at speculative
treason: they have a squint, a strong cast of the eye, that way. But it
is neither our business nor inclination to point out passages in prose
or verse, for the animadversion of the Attorney-General. Mr. Croker, we
fear, however, must have been greatly scandalised at this specimen of
his friend’s original mode of thinking for himself in such delicate
matters as the cashiering of Kings and encouraging their daughters, as
in duty bound, to stand up against them whenever Mr. Southey pleases.
_Launce_ could not have been put more to it when his dog misbehaved
‘among the gentlemanlike dogs at the Duke’s table,’ than the Admiralty
Secretary at this faux-pas of Mr. Southey’s reformed Jacobin Muse. It
was shewing the lady’s breeding to some purpose. This gratuitous piece
of advice to a Protestant Princess is, however, just the reverse of that
which Cardinal Wolsey gave to a Popish ruler of these realms, Henry
VIII., before that Monarch saw reason to change his religious principles
for a wife, as Mr. Southey has changed his political ones for a pension.
The Cardinal was almost as wise a man in his generation as Mr. Southey
is in his; saw as far into reasons of state, and charged by anticipation
all the evils of anarchy and rebellion since his time on that very
Protestant religion, which the modern courtier under the Protestant
succession considers as the only support of passive obedience and
non-resistance. Cavendish, in his Memoirs, in the Harleian Miscellany,
makes Wolsey on his death-bed give this testamentary advice to his
Sovereign:—‘And, Master Kingston, I desire you further to request his
Grace, in God’s name, that he have a vigilant eye to suppress the
hellish Lutherans, that they increase not through his great negligence,
in such a sort as to be compelled to take up arms to subdue them, as the
King of Bohemia was; whose commons being infected with Wickliff’s
heresies, the King was forced to take that course. Let him consider the
story of King Richard the Second, the second son of his progenitor, who
lived in the time of Wickliff’s seditions and heresies: did not the
commons, I pray you, in his time, rise against the nobility and chief
governors of this realm; and at the last, some of them were put to death
without justice or mercy? And, under pretence of having all things
common, did they not fall to spoiling and robbing, and at last took the
King’s person, and carried him about the city, making him obedient to
their proclamations?’—[The author of _Wat Tyler_ has given a very
different version of this story.]—‘Did not also the traitorous heretick,
Sir John Oldcastle, Lord Cobham, pitch a field with hereticks against
King Henry the Fourth, where the King was in person, and fought against
them, to whom God gave the victory? Alas! if these be not plain
precedents and sufficient persuasions to admonish a Prince, then God
will take away from us our present rulers, and leave us to the hands of
our enemies. And then will ensue mischief upon mischief, inconveniences,
barrenness, and scarcity, for want of good orders in the commonwealth,
from which God of his tender mercy defend us.’—_Harleian Miscell._ vol.
iv. p. 556.
The dying Cardinal might here be supposed to have foreseen the grand
Rebellion, the glorious Revolution of 1688, the expulsion of the
Stuarts, and the Protestant ascendancy, the American and the French
Revolutions—as all growing out of Wickliff’s heresy, and the doctrines
of the hellish Lutherans. Our laurel-honouring laureat cannot see all
this after it has happened. Wolsey was a prophet; he is only a poet.
Wolsey knew (and so would any man but a poet), that to allow men freedom
of opinion in matters of religion, was to make them free in all other
things. Mr. Southey, who raves in favour of the Bourbons and against the
Pope, is ‘blind with double darkness.’ He will assuredly never find that
‘single-heartedness’ which he seeks, but in the bosom of the Church of
Rome.
One mischief of this alliance between Church and State (which the
old-fashioned Statesman understood so thoroughly and the modern sciolist
only by halves) is, that it is tacit and covert. The Church does not
profess to take any active share in affairs of State, and by this means
is able to forward all the designs of indirect and crooked policy more
effectually and without suspicion. The garb of religion is the best
cloak for power. There is nothing so much to be guarded against as the
wolf in sheep’s clothing. The Clergy pretend to be neutral in all such
matters, not to meddle with politics. But that is, and always must be, a
false pretence. _Those that are not with us, are against us_, is a maxim
that always holds true. These pious pastors of the people and
accomplices of the government make use of their heavenly calling and
demure professions of meekness and humility, as an excuse for never
committing themselves on the side of the people: but the same sacred and
spiritual character, not to be sullied by mixing with worldly concerns,
does not hinder them from employing all their arts and influence on the
side of power and of their own interest. Their religion is incompatible
with a common regard to justice or humanity; but it is compatible with
an excess of courtly zeal. The officiating Clergyman at Derby the other
day pestered Brandreth to death with importunities to inform against his
associates, but put his hand before his mouth when he offered to say
what he knew of Oliver, the Government-spy. This is not exactly as it
should be; but it cannot be otherwise than it is. Priests are naturally
favourers of power, inasmuch as they are dependent on it.—Their power
over the mind is hardly sufficient of itself to insure absolute
obedience to their authority, without a reinforcement of power over the
body. The secular arm must come in aid of the spiritual. The law is
necessary to compel the payment of tythes. Kings and conquerors make
laws, parcel out lands, and erect churches and palaces for the priests
and dignitaries of religion: ‘they will have them to shew their mitred
fronts in Courts and Parliaments’; and in return, Priests anoint Kings
with holy oil, hedge them round with inviolability, spread over them the
mysterious sanctity of religion, and, with very little ceremony, make
over the whole species as slaves to these Gods upon earth by virtue of
divine right! This is no losing trade. It aggrandizes those who are
concerned in it, and is death to the rest of the world. It is a solemn
league and covenant fully ratified and strictly carried into effect, to
the very letter, in all countries, Pagan, Mahommedan, and
Christian,—except this. It is time to put an end to it everywhere. But
those who are pledged to its support, and ‘by this craft have their
wealth,’ have unfortunately remained of one opinion, quite
‘single-hearted’ from the beginning of the world: those who, like Mr.
Southey, are for separating the Man of Sin from the Scarlet Whore,
change their opinions once every five and twenty years. Need we wonder
at the final results? Kings and priests are not such coxcombs or
triflers as poets and philosophers. The two last are always squabbling
about their share of reputation; the two first amicably divide the
spoil. It is the opinion, we understand, of an eminent poet and a minute
philosopher of the present day, that the press ought to be
shackled,—severely shackled; and particularly that the _Edinburgh
Review_, the _Examiner_, and the _Yellow Dwarf_, as full of
_Examinerisms_, ought to be instantly put down. Another poet or
philosopher, who has not been so severely handled in these works, thinks
differently; and so do we. Nay, Mr. —— himself has been a long time in
coming to this opinion; and no wonder, for he had a long way to come in
order to arrive at it. But all the Kings that ever were, and ninety-nine
out of a hundred of all the Priests that surround them, jump at this
conclusion concerning the fatal consequences of the Liberty of the
Press—by instinct. We have never yet seen that greatest calamity that
can befal mankind, deprecated by Mr. Burke, namely, literary men acting
in _corps_, and making common cause for the benefit of mankind, as
another description of persons act in concert and make common cause
against them. He himself was an instance how little need be dreaded in
this way. If the National Assembly had sent for Burke over, to assist in
framing a Constitution for them, this traitor to liberty and apostate
from principle, instead of loading the French Revolution with every
epithet of obloquy and execration which his irritable vanity and
mercenary malice could invent, would have extolled it to the skies, as
the highest monument of human happiness and wisdom. But the genius of
philosophy, as he said, is not yet known. It is a subject which we shall
shortly endeavour to make clear.
——‘At this day
When a Tartarean darkness overspreads
The groaning nations; when the impious rule,
By will or by established ordinance,
Their own dire agents, and constrain the good
To acts which they abhor; though I bewail
This triumph, yet the pity of my heart
Prevents me not from owning that the law,
By which mankind now suffers, is most just.
FOR BY SUPERIOR ENERGIES; MORE STRICT
AFFIANCE WITH EACH OTHER; FAITH MORE FIRM
IN THEIR UNHALLOWED PRINCIPLES; THE BAD
HAVE FAIRLY EARNED A VICTORY O’ER THE WEAK,
THE VACILLATING, INCONSISTENT GOOD.’
WORDSWORTH.
In another point of view, Priests are a sort of women in the State, and
naturally subject to the higher powers. The Church has no means of
temporal advancement but through the interest and countenance of the
State. It receives what the other is pleased to allow it as a mark of
friendship, out of the public purse. The Clergy do not engage in active
or lucrative professions: they are occupied with praise and prayer and
the salvation of souls—with heaping up for themselves treasures in
heaven, and wrath upon their enemies’ heads against the day of judgment.
The candidate for Church preferment must therefore look for it as a free
gift at the hands of the great and powerful; he must win his way to
wealth and honours by ‘the sufferance of supernal power.’ The Church can
only hope for a comfortable establishment in the world by finding
favour, as a handmaid, in the eye of the State: the Church must wed the
State, both for protection and a maintenance. The preacher of God’s word
looks for his reward in heaven, but he must live in the mean time. But
he is precluded by his cloth and his spiritual avocations from getting
on in the world by the usual means of interest or ambition. His only
hope of advancement lies in the Bishop’s blessing and his patron’s
smile. These may in time translate him to a vacant diocese of 10,000_l._
a year. His labours in the cure of souls, or the settling the most
difficult point of controversial divinity, would not, on an average
calculation, bring him in a 100_l._ Parson Adams could not dispose of
his manuscript sermons to the booksellers; and he ruined his hopes of
preferment with Lady Booby, by refusing to turn pimp. Finally, the
Clergy are lovers of abstract power, for they are themselves the
representatives of almighty power: they are ambassadors of religion,
delegates of heaven. The authority under which they act is not always
respected so readily, cordially, and implicitly, as it ought to be, and
they are indignant at the neglect. They become tetchy and imperious, and
mingle the irritability of self-love with their zeal for the honour of
God. They are not backward to call for fire from heaven, and to put down
the Atheist and the Schismatic by the strong hand of power. _Fear God
and honour the King_, is the motto of priestcraft; but it is not a sound
logical dilemma, for this reason, that God is always the same; but Kings
are of all sorts, good, bad, or indifferent—wise, or mad, or
foolish—arbitrary tyrants, or constitutional Monarchs, like our own. The
rule is absolute in the first case, not in the second. But the Clergy,
by a natural infirmity, are disposed to force the two into a common
analogy. They are servants of God by profession, and sycophants of power
from necessity. They delight to look up with awe to Kings, as to another
Providence. It was a Bishop, in the reign of James I. who drew a
parallel between ‘their divine and sacred Majesties,’ meaning the
pitiful tyrant whom he served, and God Almighty: yet the
Attorney-General of that day did not prosecute him for blasphemy. The
Clergy fear God more than they love him. They think more of his power
than of his wisdom or goodness. They would make Kings Gods upon earth;
and as they cannot clothe them with the wisdom or beneficence of the
Deity, would arm them with his power at any rate.[44]
WHAT IS THE PEOPLE?
_March 7, 1818._
—And who are you that ask the question? One of the people. And yet you
would be something! Then you would not have the People nothing. For what
is the People? Millions of men, like you, with hearts beating in their
bosoms, with thoughts stirring in their minds, with the blood
circulating in their veins, with wants and appetites, and passions and
anxious cares, and busy purposes and affections for others and a respect
for themselves, and a desire of happiness, and a right to freedom, and a
will to be free. And yet you would tear out this mighty heart of a
nation, and lay it bare and bleeding at the foot of despotism: you would
slay the mind of a country to fill up the dreary aching void with the
old, obscene, drivelling prejudices of superstition and tyranny: you
would tread out the eye of Liberty (the light of nations) like ‘a vile
jelly,’ that mankind may be led about darkling to its endless drudgery,
like the Hebrew Sampson (shorn of his strength and blind), by his
insulting taskmasters: you would make the throne every thing, and the
people nothing, to be yourself less than nothing, a very slave, a
reptile, a creeping, cringing sycophant, a court favourite, a pander to
Legitimacy—that detestable fiction, which would make you and me and all
mankind its slaves or victims; which would, of right and with all the
sanctions of religion and morality, sacrifice the lives of millions to
the least of its caprices; which subjects the rights, the happiness, and
liberty of nations, to the will of some of the lowest of the species;
which rears its bloated hideous form to brave the will of a whole
people; that claims mankind as its property, and allows human nature to
exist only upon sufferance; that haunts the understanding like a
frightful spectre, and oppresses the very air with a weight that is not
to be borne; that like a witch’s spell covers the earth with a dim and
envious mist, and makes us turn our eyes from the light of heaven, which
we have no right to look at without its leave: robs us of ‘the unbought
grace of life,’ the pure delight and conscious pride in works of art or
nature; leaves us no thought or feeling that we dare call our own; makes
genius its lacquey, and virtue its easy prey; sports with human
happiness, and mocks at human misery; suspends the breath of liberty,
and almost of life; exenterates us of our affections, blinds our
understandings, debases our imaginations, converts the very hope of
emancipation from its yoke into sacrilege, binds the successive
countless generations of men together in its chains like a string of
felons or galley-slaves, lest they should ‘resemble the flies of a
summer,’ considers any remission of its absolute claims as a gracious
boon, an act of royal clemency and favour, and confounds all sense of
justice, reason, truth, liberty, humanity, in one low servile death-like
dread of power without limit and without remorse![45]
Such is the old doctrine of Divine Right, new-vamped up under the style
and title of Legitimacy. ‘Fine word, Legitimate!’ We wonder where our
English politicians picked it up. Is it an echo from the tomb of the
martyred monarch, Charles the First? Or was it the last word which his
son, James the Second, left behind him in his flight, and bequeathed
with his _abdication_, to his legitimate successors? It is not written
in our annals in the years 1688, in 1715, or 1745. It was not sterling
then, which was only fifteen years before his present Majesty’s
accession to the throne. Has it become so since? Is the Revolution of
1688 at length acknowledged to be a blot in the family escutcheon of the
Prince of Orange or the Elector of Hanover? Is the choice of the people,
which raised them to the throne, found to be the only flaw in their
title to the succession; the weight of royal gratitude growing more
uneasy with the distance of the obligation? Is the alloy of liberty,
mixed up with it, thought to debase that _fine carat_, which should
compose the regal diadem? Are the fire-new specimens of the principles
of the Right-Liners, and of Sir Robert Filmer’s patriarchal scheme, to
be met with in _The Courier_, _The Day_, _The Sun_, and some time back,
in _The Times_, handed about to be admired in the highest circle, like
the new gold coinage of sovereigns and half-sovereigns? We do not know.
It may seem to be _Latter Lammas_ with the doctrine at this time of day;
but better late than never. By taking root in the soil of France, from
which it was expelled (not quite so long as from our own), it may in
time stretch out its feelers and strong suckers to this country; and
present an altogether curious and novel aspect, by ingrafting the
principles of the House of Stuart on the illustrious stock of the House
of Brunswick.
‘Miraturque novas frondes, et non sua poma.’
What then is the People? We will answer first, by saying what it is not;
and this we cannot do better than in the words of a certain author,
whose testimony on the subject is too important not to avail ourselves
of it again in this place. That infatuated drudge of despotism, who at
one moment asks, ‘Where is the madman that maintains the doctrine of
divine right?’ and the next affirms, that ‘Louis XVIII. has the same
right to the throne of France, independently of his merits or conduct,
that Mr. Coke of Norfolk has to his estate at Holkham,’[46] has given us
a tolerable clue to what we have to expect from that mild paternal sway
to which he would so kindly make us and the rest of the world over, in
hopeless perpetuity. In a violent philippic against the author of the
_Political Register_, he thus inadvertently expresses himself:—‘Mr.
Cobbett had been sentenced to two years’ imprisonment for a libel, and
during the time that he was in Newgate, it was discovered that he had
been in treaty with Government to avoid the sentence passed upon him;
and that he had proposed to certain of the agents of Ministers, that if
they would let him off, they might make what future use they pleased of
him; _he would entirely betray the cause of the people_; he would either
write or not write, or _write against them_, as he had once done before,
just as Ministers thought proper. To this, however, it was replied, that
‘Cobbett had written on too many sides already _to be worth a groat for
the service of Government_‘; and he accordingly suffered his
confinement!’—We here then see plainly enough what it is that, in the
opinion of this very competent judge, alone renders any writer ‘worth a
groat for the service of Government,’ _viz._ that he shall be able and
willing entirely to betray the cause of the people. It follows from this
principle (by which he seems to estimate the value of his lucubrations
in the service of Government—we do not know whether the Government judge
of them in the same way), that the cause of the people and the cause of
the Government, who are represented as thus anxious to suborn their
creatures to write against the people, are not the same but the reverse
of one another. This slip of the pen in our professional retainer of
legitimacy, though a libel on our own Government, is, notwithstanding, a
general philosophic truth (the only one he ever hit upon), and an axiom
in political mechanics, which we shall make the text of the following
commentary.
What are the interests of the people? Not the interests of those who
would betray them. Who is to judge of those interests? Not those who
would suborn others to betray them. That Government is instituted for
the benefit of the governed, there can be little doubt; but the
interests of the Government (when once it becomes absolute and
independent of the people) must be directly at variance with those of
the governed. The interests of the one are common and equal rights: of
the other, exclusive and invidious privileges. The essence of the first
is to be shared alike by all, and to benefit the community in proportion
as they are spread: the essence of the last is to be destroyed by
communication, and to subsist only—in wrong of the people. Rights and
privileges are a contradiction in terms: for if one has more than his
right, others must have less. The latter are the deadly nightshade of
the commonwealth, near which no wholesome plant can thrive,—the ivy
clinging round the trunk of the British oak, blighting its verdure,
drying up its sap, and oppressing its stately growth. The insufficient
checks and balances opposed to the overbearing influence of hereditary
rank and power in our own Constitution, and in every Government which
retains the least trace of freedom, are so many illustrations of this
principle, if it needed any. The tendency in arbitrary power to encroach
upon the liberties and comforts of the people, and to convert the public
good into a stalking-horse to its own pride and avarice, has never (that
we know) been denied by any one but ‘the professional gentleman,’ who
writes in _The Day and New Times_. The great and powerful, in order to
be what they aspire to be, and what this gentleman would have them,
perfectly independent of the will of the people, ought also to be
perfectly independent of the assistance of the people. To be formally
invested with the attributes of Gods upon earth, they ought first to be
raised above its petty wants and appetites: they ought to give proofs of
the beneficence and wisdom of Gods, before they can be trusted with the
power. When we find them seated above the world, sympathizing with the
welfare, but not feeling the passions of men, receiving neither good nor
hurt, neither tilth nor tythe from them, but bestowing their benefits as
free gifts on all, they may then be expected, but not till then, to rule
over us like another Providence. We may make them a present of all the
taxes they do not apply to their own use: they are perfectly welcome to
all the power, to the possession of which they are perfectly
indifferent, and to the abuse of which they can have no possible
temptation. But Legitimate Governments (flatter them as we will) are not
another Heathen mythology. They are neither so cheap nor so splendid as
the Delphin edition of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. They are indeed ‘Gods to
punish,’ but in other respects ‘men of our infirmity.’ They do not feed
on ambrosia or drink nectar; but live on the common fruits of the earth,
of which they get the largest share, and the best. The wine they drink
is made of grapes: the blood they shed is that of their subjects: the
laws they make are not against themselves: the taxes they vote, they
afterwards devour. They have the same wants that we have: and having the
option, very naturally help themselves first, out of the common stock,
without thinking that others are to come after them. With the same
natural necessities, they have a thousand artificial ones besides; and
with a thousand times the means to gratify them, they are still
voracious, importunate, unsatisfied. Our State-paupers have their hands
in every man’s dish, and fare sumptuously every day. They live in
palaces, and loll in coaches. In spite of Mr. Malthus, their studs of
horses consume the produce of our fields, their dog-kennels are glutted
with the food which would maintain the children of the poor. They cost
us so much a year in dress and furniture, so much in stars and garters,
blue ribbons, and grand crosses,—so much in dinners, breakfasts, and
suppers, and so much in suppers, breakfasts, and dinners.[47] These
heroes of the Income-tax, Worthies of the Civil List, Saints of the
Court calendar (_Compagnons du Lys_), have their naturals and
non-naturals, like the rest of the world, but at a dearer rate. They are
real _bonâ fide_ personages, and do not live upon air. You will find it
easier to keep them a week than a month; and at the end of that time,
waking from the sweet dream of Legitimacy, you may say with Caliban,
‘Why, what a fool was I to take this drunken monster for a God!’ In
fact, the case on the part of the people is so far self-evident. There
is but a limited earth and a limited fertility to supply the demands
both of Government and people; and what the one gains in the division of
the spoil, beyond its average proportion, the other must needs go
without. Do you suppose that our gentlemen-placemen and pensioners would
suffer so many wretches to be perishing in our streets and highways, if
they could relieve their extreme misery without parting with any of
their own superfluities? If the Government take a fourth of the produce
of the poor man’s labour, they will be rich, and he will be in want. If
they can contrive to take one half of it by legal means, or by a stretch
of arbitrary power, they will be just twice as rich, twice as insolent
and tyrannical, and he will be twice as poor, twice as miserable and
oppressed, in a mathematical ratio to the end of the chapter, that is,
till the one can extort and the other endure no more. It is the same
with respect to power. The will and passions of the great are not
exerted in regulating the seasons, or rolling the planets round their
orbits for our good, without fee or reward, but in controlling the will
and passions of others, in making the follies and vices of mankind
subservient to their own, and marring,
‘Because men suffer it, their toy, the world.’
This is self-evident, like the former. Their will cannot be paramount,
while any one in the community, or the whole community together, has the
power to thwart it. A King cannot attain absolute power, while the
people remain perfectly free; yet what King would not attain absolute
power? While any trace of liberty is left among a people, ambitious
Princes will never be easy, never at peace, never of sound mind; nor
will they ever rest or leave one stone unturned, till they have
succeeded in destroying the very name of liberty, or making it into a
by-word, and in rooting out the germs of every popular right and liberal
principle from a soil once sacred to liberty. It is not enough that they
have secured the whole power of the state in their hands,—that they
carry every measure they please without the chance of an effectual
opposition to it: but a word uttered against it is torture to their
ears,—a thought that questions their wanton exercise of the royal
prerogative rankles in their breasts like poison. Till all distinctions
of right and wrong, liberty and slavery, happiness and misery, are
looked upon as matters of indifference, or as saucy, insolent
pretensions,—are sunk and merged in their idle caprice and pampered
self-will, they will still feel themselves ‘cribbed, confined, and
cabin’d in’: but if they can once more set up the doctrine of
Legitimacy, ‘the right divine of Kings to govern wrong,’ and set mankind
at defiance with impunity, they will then be ‘broad and casing as the
general air, whole as the rock.’ This is the point from which they set
out, and to which by the grace of God and the help of man they may
return again. Liberty is short and fleeting, a transient grace that
lights upon the earth by stealth and at long intervals—
‘Like the rainbow’s lovely form,
Evanishing amid the storm;
Or like the Borealis race,
That shift ere you can point their place;
Or like the snow falls in the river,
A moment white, then melts for ever.’
But power is eternal; it is ‘enthroned in the hearts of Kings.’ If you
want the proofs, look at history, look at geography, look abroad; but do
not look at home!
The power of an arbitrary King or an aspiring Minister does not increase
with the liberty of the subject, but must be circumscribed by it. It is
aggrandized by perpetual, systematic, insidious, or violent
encroachments on popular freedom and natural right, as the sea gains
upon the land by swallowing it up.—What then can we expect from the mild
paternal sway of absolute power, and its sleek minions? What the world
has always received at its hands, an abuse of power as vexatious,
cowardly, and unrelenting, as the power itself was unprincipled,
preposterous, and unjust. They who get wealth and power from the people,
who drive them like cattle to slaughter or to market, ‘and levy cruel
wars, wasting the earth’; they who wallow in luxury, while the people
are ‘steeped in poverty to the very lips,’ and bowed to the earth with
unremitting labour, can have but little sympathy with those whose loss
of liberty and property is their gain. What is it that the wealth of
thousands is composed of? The tears, the sweat, and blood of millions.
What is it that constitutes the glory of the Sovereigns of the earth? To
have millions of men their slaves. Wherever the Government does not
emanate (as in our own excellent Constitution) from the people, the
principle of the Government, the _esprit de corps_, the point of honour,
in all those connected with it, and raised by it to privileges above the
law and above humanity, will be hatred to the people. Kings who would be
thought to reign in contempt of the people, will shew their contempt of
them in every act of their lives. Parliaments, not chosen by the people,
will only be the instruments of Kings, who do not reign in the hearts of
the people, ‘to betray the cause of the people.’ Ministers, not
responsible to the people, will squeeze the last shilling out of them.
_Charity begins at home_, is a maxim as true of Governments as of
individuals. When the English Parliament insisted on its right of taxing
the Americans without their consent, it was not from an apprehension
that the Americans would, by being left to themselves, lay such heavy
duties on their own produce and manufactures, as would afflict the
generosity of the mother-country, and put the mild paternal sentiments
of Lord North to the blush. If any future King of England should keep a
wistful eye on the map of that country, it would rather be to hang it up
as a trophy of legitimacy, and to ‘punish the last successful example of
a democratic rebellion,’ than from any yearnings of fatherly good-will
to the American people, or from finding his ‘large heart’ and capacity
for good government, ‘confined in too narrow room’ in the united
kingdoms of Great Britain, Ireland, and Hanover. If Ferdinand VII.
refuses the South American patriots leave to plant the olive or the
vine, throughout that vast continent, it is his pride, not his humanity,
that steels his royal resolution.[48]
In 1781, the Controller-general of France, under Louis XVI. Monsieur
Joli de Fleuri, defined the people of France to be _un peuple serf,
corveable et baillable, à merci et misericorde_. When Louis XVIII. as
the Count de Lille, protested against his brother’s accepting the
Constitution of 1792 (he has since become an accepter of Constitutions
himself, if not an observer of them,) as compromising the rights and
privileges of the noblesse and clergy as well as of the crown, he was
right in considering the Bastile, or ‘King’s castle,’ with the
picturesque episode of the Man in the Iron Mask, the fifteen thousand
_lettres de cachet_, issued in the mild reign of Louis XV., _corvées_,
tythes, game-laws, holy water, the right of pillaging, imprisoning,
massacring, persecuting, harassing, insulting, and ingeniously
tormenting the minds and bodies of the whole French people at every
moment of their lives, on every possible pretence, and without any check
or control but their own mild paternal sentiments towards them, as among
the _menus plaisirs_, the chief points of etiquette, the immemorial
privileges, and favourite amusements of Kings, Priests, and Nobles, from
the beginning to the end of time, without which the bare title of King,
Priest, or Noble, would not have been worth a groat.
The breasts of Kings and Courtiers then are not the safest depository of
the interests of the people. But they know best what is for their good!
Yes—to prevent it! The people may indeed feel their grievance, but their
betters, it is said, must apply the remedy—which they take good care
never to do! If the people want judgment in their own affairs (which is
not certain, for they only meddle with their own affairs when they are
forcibly brought home to them in a way which they can hardly
misunderstand), this is at any rate better than the want of sincerity,
which would constantly and systematically lead their superiors to betray
those interests, from their having other ends of their own to serve. It
is better to trust to ignorance than to malice—to run the risk of
sometimes miscalculating the odds than to play against loaded dice. The
people would in this way stand as little chance in defending their
purses or their persons against Mr. C—— or Lord C——, as an honest
country gentleman would have had in playing at put or hazard with Count
Fathom or Jonathan Wild. A certain degree of folly, or rashness, or
indecision, or even violence in attaining an object, is surely less to
be dreaded than a malignant, deliberate, mercenary intention in others
to deprive us of it. If the people must have attorneys, and the advice
of counsel, let them have attorneys and counsel of their own chusing,
not those who are employed by special retainer against them, or who
regularly hire others to _betray their cause_.
—— —— ——‘O silly sheep,
Come ye to seek the lamb here of the wolf?’
This then is the cause of the people, the good of the people, judged of
by common feeling and public opinion. Mr. Burke contemptuously defines
the people to be ‘any faction that at the time can get the power of the
sword into its hands.’ No: that may be a description of the Government,
but it is not of the people. The people is the hand, heart, and head of
the whole community acting to one purpose, and with a mutual and
thorough consent. The hand of the people so employed to execute what the
heart feels, and the head thinks, must be employed more beneficially for
the cause of the people, than in executing any measures which the cold
hearts, and contriving heads of any faction, with distinct privileges
and interests, may dictate to betray their cause. The will of the people
necessarily tends to the general good as its end; and it must attain
that end, and can only attain it, in proportion as it is guided—First,
by popular feeling, as arising out of the immediate wants and wishes of
the great mass of the people,—secondly, by public opinion, as arising
out of the impartial reason and enlightened intellect of the community.
What is it that determines the opinion of any number of persons in
things they actually feel in their practical and home results? Their
common interest. What is it that determines their opinion in things of
general inquiry, beyond their immediate experience or interest? Abstract
reason. In matters of feeling and common sense, of which each individual
is the best judge, the majority are in the right; in things requiring a
greater strength of mind to comprehend them, the greatest power of
understanding will prevail, if it has but fair play. These two, taken
together, as the test of the practical measures or general principles of
Government, must be right, cannot be wrong. It is an absurdity to
suppose that there can be any better criterion of national grievances,
or the proper remedies for them, than the aggregate amount of the
actual, dear-bought experience, the honest feelings, and heartfelt
wishes of a whole people, informed and directed by the greatest power of
understanding in the community, unbiassed by any sinister motive. Any
other standard of public good or ill must, in proportion as it deviates
from this, be vitiated in principle, and fatal in its effects. _Vox
populi vox Dei_, is the rule of all good Government: for in that voice,
truly collected and freely expressed (not when it is made the servile
echo of a corrupt Court, or a designing Minister), we have all the
sincerity and all the wisdom of the community. If we could suppose
society to be transformed into one great animal (like Hobbes’s
Leviathan), each member of which had an intimate connexion with the head
or Government, so that every individual in it could be made known and
have its due weight, the State would have the same consciousness of its
own wants and feelings, and the same interest in providing for them, as
an individual has with respect to his own welfare. Can any one doubt
that such a state of society in which the greatest knowledge of its
interests was thus combined with the greatest sympathy with its wants,
would realize the idea of a perfect Commonwealth? But such a Government
would be the precise idea of a truly popular or _representative_
Government. The opposite extreme is the purely hereditary and despotic
form of Government, where the people are an inert, torpid mass, without
the power, scarcely with the will, to make its wants or wishes known:
and where the feelings of those who are at the head of the State, centre
in their own exclusive interests, pride, passions, prejudices; and all
their thoughts are employed in defeating the happiness and undermining
the liberties of a country.
WHAT IS THE PEOPLE?
(CONCLUDED.)
_March 14, 1818._
It is not denied that the people are best acquainted with their own
wants, and most attached to their own interests. But then a question is
started, as if the persons asking it were at a great loss for the
answer,—Where are we to find the intellect of the people? Why, all the
intellect that ever was is theirs. The public opinion expresses not only
the collective sense of the whole people, but of all ages and nations,
of all those minds that have devoted themselves to the love of truth and
the good of mankind,—who have bequeathed their instructions, their
hopes, and their example to posterity,—who have thought, spoke, written,
acted, and suffered in the name and on the behalf of our common nature.
All the greatest poets, sages, heroes, are ours originally, and by
right. But surely Lord Bacon was a great man? Yes; but not because he
was a lord. There is nothing of hereditary growth but pride and
prejudice. That ‘fine word Legitimate’ never produced any thing but
bastard philosophy and patriotism! Even Burke was one of the people, and
would have remained with the people to the last, if there had been no
court-side for him to go over to. The King gave him his pension, not his
understanding or his eloquence. It would have been better for him and
for mankind if he had kept to his principles, and gone without his
pension. It is thus that the tide of power constantly setting in against
the people, swallows up natural genius and acquired knowledge in the
vortex of corruption, and then they reproach us with our want of leaders
of weight and influence, to stem the torrent. All that has ever been
done for society, has, however, been done for it by this intellect,
before it was cheapened to be a cat’s-paw of divine right. All
discoveries and all improvements in arts, in science, in legislation, in
civilization, in every thing dear and valuable to the heart of man, have
been made by this intellect—all the triumphs of human genius over the
rudest barbarism, the darkest ignorance, the grossest and most inhuman
superstition, the most unmitigated and remorseless tyranny, have been
gained for themselves by the people. Great Kings, great law-givers,
great founders, and great reformers of religion, have almost all arisen
from among the people. What have hereditary Monarchs, or regular
Governments, or established priesthoods, ever done for the people? Did
the Pope and Cardinals first set on foot the Reformation? Did the
Jesuits attempt to abolish the Inquisition? For what one measure of
civil or religious liberty did our own Bench of Bishops ever put
themselves forward? What judge ever proposed a reform in the laws! Have
not the House of Commons, with all their ‘tried wisdom,’ voted for every
measure of Ministers for the last twenty-five years, except the
Income-tax? It is the press that has done every thing for the people,
and even for Governments.—‘If they had not ploughed with our heifer,
they would not have found out our riddle.’ And it has done this by slow
degrees, by repeated, incessant, and incredible struggles with the
oldest, most inveterate, powerful, and active enemies of the freedom of
the press and of the people, who wish, in spite of the nature of things
and of society, to retain the idle and mischievous privileges they
possess as the relics of barbarous and feudal times, who have an
exclusive interest as a separate cast in the continuance of all existing
abuses, and who plead a permanent _vested right_ in the prevention of
the progress of reason, liberty, and civilization. Yet they tax us with
our want of intellect; and _we_ ask them in return for their court-list
of great names in arts or philosophy, for the coats of arms of their
heroic vanquishers of error and intolerance, for their devout
benefactors and royal martyrs of humanity. What are the claims of the
people—the obvious, undoubted rights of common justice and humanity,
forcibly withheld from them by pride, bigotry, and selfishness,—demanded
for them, age after age, year after year, by the wisdom and virtue of
the enlightened and disinterested part of mankind, and only grudgingly
yielded up, with indecent, disgusting excuses, and sickening delays,
when the burning shame of their refusal can be no longer concealed by
fear or favour from the whole world. What did it not cost to abolish the
Slave Trade? How long will the Catholic Claims be withheld by our
State-jugglers? How long, and for what purpose? We may appeal, in behalf
of the people, from the interested verdict of the worst and weakest men
now living, to the disinterested reason of the best and wisest men among
the living and the dead. We appeal from the corruption of Courts, the
hypocrisy of zealots, and the dotage of hereditary imbecility, to the
innate love of liberty in the human breast, and to the growing intellect
of the world. We appeal to the pen, and they answer us with the point of
the bayonet; and, at one time, when that had failed, they were for
recommending the dagger.[49] They quote Burke, but rely on the
Attorney-General. They hold Universal Suffrage to be the most dreadful
of all things, and a Standing Army the best representatives of the
people abroad and at home. They think Church-and-King mobs good things,
for the same reason that they are alarmed at a meeting to petition for a
Reform of Parliament. They consider the cry of ‘No Popery’ a sound,
excellent, and constitutional cry,—but the cry of a starving population
for food, strange and unnatural. They exalt the war-whoop of the
Stock-Exchange into the voice of undissembled patriotism, while they set
down the cry for peace as the work of the Jacobins, the ventriloquism of
the secret enemies of their country. The writers on the popular side of
the question are factious, designing demagogues, who delude the people
to make tools of them: but the government-writers, who echo every
calumny, and justify every encroachment on the people, are profound
philosophers and very honest men. Thus when Mr. John Gifford, the Editor
of the ‘Anti-Jacobin’ (not Mr. William Gifford, who at present holds the
same office under Government, as the Editor of the ‘Quarterly Review’),
denounced Mr. Coleridge as a person, who had ‘left his wife destitute
and his children fatherless,’ and proceeded to add—‘_Ex hoc disce_ his
friends Lamb and Southey’—we are to suppose that he was influenced in
this gratuitous statement purely by his love for his King and country.
Loyalty, patriotism, and religion, are regarded as the natural virtues
and plain unerring instincts of the common people: the mixture of
ignorance or prejudice is never objected to in these: it is only their
love of liberty or hatred of oppression that are discovered, by the same
liberal-minded junto, to be proofs of a base and vulgar disposition. The
Bourbons are set over the immense majority of the French people against
their will, because a talent for governing does not go with numbers.
This argument was not thought of when Bonaparte tried to shew his talent
for governing the people of the Continent against their will, though he
had quite as much talent as the Bourbons. Mr. Canning rejoiced that the
first successful resistance to Bonaparte was made in Russia, a country
of barbarians and slaves. The heroic struggles of ‘the universal Spanish
nation’ in the cause of freedom and independence, have ended in the
destruction of the Cortes and the restoration of the Inquisition, but
without making the Duke of Wellington look thoughtful:—not a single
renegado poet has vented his indignation in a single ode, elegy, or
sonnet; nor does Mr. Southey ‘make him a willow cabin at its gate, write
loyal cantos of contemned love, and sing them loud even in the dead of
the night!’ He indeed assures us in the ‘Quarterly Review,’ that the
Inquisition was restored by the voice of the Spanish people. He also
asks, in the same place, ‘whether the voice of God was heard in the
voice of the people at Jerusalem, when they cried, “Crucify him, crucify
him”?’ We do not know; but we suppose, he would hardly go to the Chief
Priests and Pharisees to find it. This great historian, politician, and
logician, breaks out into a rhapsody against the old maxim, ‘_vox populi
vox Dei_, in the midst of an article of 55 pages, written expressly to
prove that the last war was ‘the most popular, _because_ the most just
and necessary war that ever was carried on.’ He shrewdly asks, ‘Has the
_vox populi_ been the _vox Dei_ in France for the last twenty-five
years?’ But, at least, according to his own shewing, it has been so in
this country for all that period. We, however, do not think so. The
voice of the country has been for war, because the voice of the King was
for it, which was echoed by Parliament, both Lords and Commons, by
Clergy and Gentry, and by the populace, till, as Mr. Southey himself
states in the same connected chain of reasoning, the cry for war became
_so_ popular, that all those who did not join in it (of which number the
Poet-laureate himself was one) were ‘persecuted, insulted, and injured
in their persons, fame, and fortune.’ This is the true way of accounting
for the fact, but it unfortunately knocks the Poet’s inference on the
head. Mr. Locke has observed, that there are not so many wrong opinions
in the world as we are apt to believe, because most people take their
opinions on trust from others. Neither are the opinions of the people
their own, when they have been bribed or bullied into them by a mob of
Lords and Gentlemen, following in full cry at the heels of the Court.
The _vox populi_ is the _vox Dei_ only when it springs from the
individual, unbiassed feelings, and unfettered, independent opinion of
the people. Mr. Southey does not understand the terms of this good old
adage, now that he is so furious against it: we fear, he understood them
no better when he was as loudly in favour of it.
All the objections, indeed, to the voice of the people being the best
rule for Government to attend to, arise from the stops and impediments
to the expression of that voice, from the attempts to stifle or to give
it a false bias, and to cut off its free and open communication with the
head and heart of the people—by the Government itself. The sincere
expression of the feelings of the people must be true; the full and free
development of the public opinion must lead to truth, to the gradual
discovery and diffusion of knowledge in this, as in all other
departments of human inquiry. It is the interest of Governments in
general to keep the people in a state of vassalage as long as they
can—to prevent the expression of their sentiments, and the exercise and
improvement of their understandings, by all the means in their power.
They have a patent, and a monopoly, which they do not like to have
looked into or to share with others. The argument for keeping the people
in a state of lasting wardship, or for treating them as lunatics,
incapable of self-government, wears a very suspicious aspect, as it
comes from those who are trustees to the estate, or keepers of insane
asylums. The long minority of the people would, at this rate, never
expire, while those who had an interest had also the power to prevent
them from arriving at years of discretion: their government-keepers have
nothing to do but to drive the people mad by ill-treatment, and to keep
them so by worse, in order to retain the pretence for applying the gag,
the strait waistcoat, and the whip as long as they please. It is like
the dispute between Mr. Epps, the angry shopkeeper in the Strand, and
his journeyman, whom he would restrict from setting up for himself.
Shall we never serve out our apprenticeship to liberty? Must our
indentures to slavery bind us for life? It is well, it is perfectly
well. You teach us nothing, and you will not let us learn. You deny us
education, like Orlando’s eldest brother, and then ‘stying us’ in the
den of legitimacy, you refuse to let us take the management of our own
affairs into our own hands, or to seek our fortunes in the world
ourselves. You found a right to treat us with indignity on the plea of
your own neglect and injustice. You abuse a trust in order to make it
perpetual. You profit of our ignorance and of your own wrong. You
degrade, and then enslave us; and by enslaving, you degrade us more, to
make us more and more incapable of ever escaping from your selfish,
sordid yoke. There is no end of this. It is the fear of the progress of
knowledge and a _Reading Public_, that has produced all the fuss and
bustle and cant about Bell and Lancaster’s plans, Bible and Missionary,
and Auxiliary and Cheap Tract Societies, and that when it was impossible
to prevent our reading something, made the Church and State so anxious
to provide us with that sort of food for our stomachs, which they
thought best. The Bible is an excellent book; and when it becomes the
Statesman’s Manual, in its precepts of charity—not of beggarly
alms-giving, but of peace on earth and good will to man, the people may
read nothing else. It reveals the glories of the world to come, and
records the preternatural dispensations of Providence to mankind two
thousand years ago. But it does not describe the present state of
Europe, or give an account of the measures of the last or of the next
reign, which yet it is important the people of England should look to.
We cannot learn from Moses and the Prophets what Mr. Vansittart and the
Jews are about in ‘Change-alley. Those who prescribe us the study of the
miracles and prophecies, themselves laugh to scorn the promised
deliverance of Joanna Southcott and the Millennium. Yet they would have
us learn patience and resignation from the miraculous interpositions of
Providence recorded in the Scriptures. ‘_When the sky falls_’—the
proverb is somewhat musty. The worst compliment ever paid to the Bible
was the recommendation of it as a political palliative by the Lay
Preachers of the day.
To put this question in a different light, we might ask, What is the
public? and examine what would be the result of depriving the people of
the use of their understandings in other matters as well as
government—to subject them to the trammels of prescriptive prejudice and
hereditary pretension. Take the stage as an example. Suppose Mr. Kean
should have a son, a little crook-kneed, raven-voiced, disagreeable,
mischievous, stupid urchin, with the faults of his father’s acting
exaggerated tenfold, and none of his fine qualities,—what if Mr. Kean
should take it into his head to get out letters-patents to empower him
and his heirs for ever, with this hopeful commencement, to play all the
chief parts in tragedy, by the grace of God and the favour of the Prince
Regent! What a precious race of tragedy kings and heroes we should have!
They would not even play the villain with a good grace. The theatres
would soon be deserted, and the race of the Keans would ‘hold a barren
sceptre’ over empty houses, to be ‘wrenched from them by an unlineal
hand!’—But no! For it would be necessary to uphold theatrical order, the
cause of the legitimate drama, and so to levy a tax on all those who
staid away from the theatre, or to drag them into it by force. Every one
seeing the bayonet at the door, would be compelled to applaud the hoarse
tones and lengthened pauses of the illustrious house of Kean; the
newspaper critics would grow wanton in their praise, and all those would
be held as rancorous enemies of their country, and of the prosperity of
the stage, who did not join in the praises of the best of actors. What a
falling off there would be from the present system of universal suffrage
and open competition among the candidates, the frequency of rows in the
pit, the noise in the gallery, the whispers in the boxes, and the
lashing in the newspapers the next day!
In fact, the argument drawn from the supposed incapacity of the people
against a representative Government, comes with the worst grace in the
world from the patrons and admirers of hereditary government. Surely, if
government were a thing requiring the utmost stretch of genius, wisdom,
and virtue, to carry it on, the office of King would never even have
been dreamt of as hereditary, any more than that of poet, painter, or
philosopher. It is easy here ‘for the Son to tread in the Sire’s steady
steps.’ It requires nothing but the will to do it. Extraordinary talents
are not once looked for. Nay, a person, who would never have risen by
natural abilities to the situation of churchwarden or parish beadle,
succeeds by unquestionable right to the possession of a throne and
wields the energies of an empire, or decides the fate of the world, with
the smallest possible share of human understanding. The line of
distinction which separates the regal purple from the slabbering-bib, is
sometimes fine indeed; as we see in the case of the two Ferdinands. Any
one above the rank of an ideot is supposed capable of exercising the
highest functions of royal state. Yet these are the persons who talk of
the people as a swinish multitude, and taunt them with their want of
refinement and philosophy.
* * * * *
The great problem of political science is not of so profoundly
metaphysical or highly poetical a cast as Mr. Burke represents it. It is
simply a question on the one part, with how little expense of liberty
and property the Government, ‘that complex constable,’ as it has been
quaintly called, can keep the peace; and on the other part, for how
great a sacrifice of both, the splendour of the throne and the safety of
the state can be made a pretext. Kings and their Ministers generally
strive to get their hands in our pockets, and their feet on our necks;
the people and their representatives will be wise enough, if they can
only contrive to prevent them; but this, it must be confessed, they do
not always succeed in. For a people to be free, it is sufficient that
they will to be free. But the love of liberty is less strong than the
love of power; and is guided by a less sure instinct in attaining its
object. Milton only spoke the sentiments of the English people of his
day (sentiments too which they had acted upon), in strong language, when
he said, in answer to a foreign pedant:—‘_Liceat, quæso, populo qui
servitutis jugum in cervicibus grave sentit, tam sapienti esse, tam
docto, tamque nobili, ut sciat quid tyranno suo faciendum sit, etiamsi
neque exteros neque grammaticos sciscitatum mittat._’—(_Defensio pro
populo Anglicano._) Happily the whole of the passage is not applicable
to their descendants in the present day; but at all times a people may
be allowed to know when they are oppressed, enslaved, and miserable, to
feel their wrongs and to demand a remedy—from the superior knowledge and
humanity of Ministers, who, if they cannot cure the State-malady, ought
in decency, like other doctors, to resign their authority over the
patient. The people are not subject to fanciful wants, speculative
longings, or hypochondriacal complaints. Their disorders are real, their
complaints substantial and well-founded. Their grumblings are in general
seditions of the belly. They do not cry out till they are hurt. They do
not stand upon nice questions, or trouble themselves with Mr. Burke’s
Sublime and Beautiful; but when they find the money conjured clean out
of their pockets, and the Constitution suspended over their heads, they
think it time to look about them. For example, poor Evans, that amateur
of music and politics (strange combination of tastes), thought it hard,
no doubt to be sent to prison and deprived of his flute by a
State-warrant, because there was no ground for doing it by law; and Mr.
Hiley Addington, being himself a flute-player, thought so too: though,
in spite of this romantic sympathy, the Minister prevailed over the
musician, and Mr. Evans has, we believe, never got back his flute. For
an act of injustice, by the new system, if complained of ‘forsooth,’
becomes justifiable by the very resistance to it: if not complained of,
nobody knows any thing about it, and so it goes equally unredressed in
either way. Or to take another obvious instance and sign of the times: a
tenant or small farmer who has been distrained upon and sent to gaol or
to the workhouse, probably thinks, and with some appearance of reason,
that he was better off before this change of circumstances; and Mr.
Cobbett, in his twopenny Registers, proves to him so clearly, that this
change for the worse is owing to the war and taxes, which have driven
him out of his house and home, that Mr. Cobbett himself has been forced
to quit the country to argue the question, whether two and two make
four, with Mr. Vansittart, upon safer ground to himself, and more equal
ground to the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Such questions as these are,
one would think, within the verge of common sense and reason. For any
thing we could ever find, the people have as much common sense and sound
judgment as any other class of the community. Their folly is
second-hand, derived from their being the dupe of the passions,
interests, and prejudices of their superiors. When they judge for
themselves, they in general judge right. At any rate, the way to improve
their judgment in their own concerns (and if they do not judge for
themselves, they will infallibly be cheated both of liberty and
property, by those who kindly insist on relieving them of that trouble)
is not to deny them the use and exercise of their judgment altogether.
Nothing can be pleasanter than one of the impositions of late attempted
to be put upon the people, by persuading them that economy is no part of
a wise Government. The people must be pretty competent judges of the
cheapness of a Government. But it is pretended by our high-flying
sinecurists and pensioners, that this is a low and vulgar view of the
subject, taken up by interested knaves, like Paine and Cobbett, to
delude, and, in the end, make their market of the people. With all the
writers and orators who compose the band of gentlemen pensioners and
their patrons, politics is entirely a thing of sentiment and
imagination. To speak of the expenses of Government, as if it were a
little paltry huckstering calculation of profit and loss, quite shocks
their lofty, liberal, and disinterested notions. They have no patience
with the people if they are not ready to sacrifice their all for the
public good! This is something like a little recruiting
cavalry-lieutenant we once met with, who, sorely annoyed at being so
often dunned for the arrears of board and lodging by the people where he
took up his quarters, exclaimed with the true broad Irish accent and
emphasis—‘_Vulgar ideas! These wretches always expect one to pay for
what one has of them!_’ Our modest lieutenant thought, that while he was
employed on his Majesty’s service, he had a right to pick the pockets of
his subjects, and that if they complained of being robbed of what was
their own, they were blackguards and _no gentlemen_! Mr. Canning hit
upon nothing so good as this, in his luminous defence of his Lisbon Job!
But allow the people to be as gross and ignorant as you please, as base
and stupid as you can make them or keep them, ‘duller than the fat weed
that roots itself at ease on Lethe’s wharf,’—is nothing ever to rouse
them? Grant that they are slow of apprehension—that they do not see till
they feel. Is that a reason that they are not to feel then, neither?
Would you blindfold them with the double bandages of bigotry, or quench
their understandings with ‘the dim suffusion,’ ‘the drop serene,’ of
Legitimacy, that ‘they may roll in vain and find no dawn’ of liberty, no
ray of hope? Because they do not see tyranny till it is mountain high,
‘making Ossa like a wart,’ are they not to feel its weight when it is
heaped upon them, or to throw it off with giant strength and a
convulsive effort? If they do not see the evil till it has grown
enormous, palpable, and undeniable, is that a reason why others should
then deny that it exists, or why it should not be removed? They do not
snuff arbitrary power a century off: they are not shocked at it on the
other side of the globe, or of the Channel: are they not therefore to
see it, could it in time be supposed to stalk over their heads, to
trample and grind them to the earth? If in their uncertainty how to deal
with it, they sometimes strike random blows, if their despair makes them
dangerous, why do not they, who, from their elevated situation, see so
much farther and deeper into the principles and consequences of
things—in their boasted wisdom prevent the causes of complaint in the
people before they accumulate to a terrific height, and burst upon the
heads of their oppressors? The higher classes, who would disqualify the
people from taking the cure of their disorders into their own hands,
might do this very effectually, by preventing the first symptoms of
their disorders. They would do well, instead of abusing the blunders and
brutishness of the multitude, to shew their superior penetration and
zeal in detecting the first approaches of mischief, in withstanding
every encroachment on the comforts and rights of the people, in guarding
every bulwark against the influence and machinations of arbitrary power,
as a precious, inviolable, sacred trust. Instead of this, they are the
first to be lulled into security, a security ‘as gross as ignorance made
drunk’—the last to believe the consequences, because they are the last
to feel them. Instead of this, the patience of the lower classes, in
submitting to privations and insults, is only surpassed by the
callousness of their betters in witnessing them. The one never set about
the redress of grievances or the reform of abuses, till they are no
longer to be borne; the others will not hear of it even then. It is for
this reason, among others, that the _vox populi_ is the _vox Dei_, that
it is the agonizing cry of human nature raised, and only raised, against
intolerable oppression and the utmost extremity of human suffering. The
people do not rise up till they are trod down. They do not turn upon
their tormentors till they are goaded to madness. They do not complain
till the thumb-screws have been applied, and have been strained to the
last turn. Nothing can ever wean the affections or confidence of a
people from a Government (to which habit, prejudice, natural pride,
perhaps old benefits and joint struggles for liberty have attached them)
but an excessive degree of irritation and disgust, occasioned either by
a sudden and violent stretch of power, contrary to the spirit and forms
of the established Government, or by a blind and wilful adherence to old
abuses and established forms, when the changes in the state of manners
and opinion have rendered them as odious as they are ridiculous. The
Revolutions of Switzerland, the Low Countries, and of America, are
examples of the former—the French Revolution of the latter: our own
Revolution of 1688 was a mixture of the two. As a general rule, it might
be laid down, that for every instance of national resistance to tyranny,
there ought to have been hundreds, and that all those which have been
attempted ought to have succeeded. In the case of Wat Tyler, for
instance, which has been so naturally dramatised by the poet-laureate,
the rebellion was crushed, and the ringleaders hanged by the treachery
of the Government; but the grievances of which they had complained were
removed a few years after, and the rights they had claimed granted to
the people, from the necessary progress of civilization and knowledge.
Did not Mr. Southey know, when he applied for an injunction against Wat
Tyler, that the feudal system had been abolished long ago?—Again, as
nothing rouses the people to resistance but extreme and aggravated
injustice, so nothing can make them persevere in it, or push their
efforts to a successful and triumphant issue, but the most open and
unequivocal determination to brave their cries and insult their misery.
They have no principle of union in themselves, and nothing brings or
holds them together, but the strong pressure of want, the stern hand of
necessity—‘a necessity that is not chosen, but chuses,—a necessity
paramount to deliberation, that admits of no discussion and demands no
evidence, that can alone, (according to Mr. Burke’s theory) justify a
resort to anarchy,’ and that alone ever did or can produce it. In fine,
there are but two things in the world, might and right. Whenever one of
these is overcome, it is by the other. The triumphs of the people, or
the stand which they at any time make against arbitrary sway, are the
triumphs of reason and justice over the insolence of individual power
and authority, which, unless as it is restrained, curbed, and corrected
by popular feeling or public opinion, can be guided only by its own
drunken, besotted, mad pride, selfishness and caprice, and must be
productive of all the mischief, which it can wantonly or deliberately
commit with impunity.
The people are not apt, like a fine lady, to affect the vapours of
discontent; nor to volunteer a rebellion for the theatrical eclat of the
thing. But the least plausible excuse, one kind word, one squeeze of the
hand, one hollow profession of good will, subdues the soft heart of
rebellion, (which is ‘too foolish fond and pitiful’ to be a match for
the callous hypocrisy opposed to it) dissolves and melts the whole
fabric of popular innovation like butter in the sun. Wat Tyler is a case
in point again. The instant the effeminate king and his unprincipled
courtiers gave them fair words, they dispersed, relying in their
infatuation on the word of the King as binding, on the oath of his
officers as sincere; and no sooner were they dispersed than they cut off
their leaders’ heads, and poor John Ball’s along with them, in spite of
all his texts of Scripture. The story is to be seen in all the
shop-windows, _written in very choice blank verse_!—That the people are
rash in trusting to the promises of their friends, is true; they are
more rash in believing their enemies. If they are led to expect too much
in theory, they are satisfied with too little in reality. Their anger is
sometimes fatal while it lasts, but it is not roused very soon, nor does
it last very long. Of all dynasties, anarchy is the shortest lived. They
are violent in their revenge, no doubt; but it is because justice has
been long denied them, and they have to pay off a very long score at a
very short notice. What Cæsar says of himself, might be applied well
enough to the people, that they ‘did never wrong but with just cause.’
The errors of the people are the crimes of Governments. They apply sharp
remedies to lingering diseases, and when they get sudden power in their
hands, frighten their enemies, and wound themselves with it. They rely
on brute force and the fury of despair, in proportion to the treachery
which surrounds them, and to the degradation, the want of general
information and mutual co-operation, in which they have been kept, on
purpose to prevent them from ever acting in concert, with wisdom,
energy, confidence, and calmness, for the public good. The American
Revolution produced no horrors, because its enemies could not succeed in
sowing the seeds of terror, hatred, mutual treachery, and universal
dismay in the hearts of the people. The French Revolution, under the
auspices of Mr. Burke, and other friends of social order, was tolerably
prolific of these horrors. But that should not be charged as the fault
of the Revolution or of the people. Timely Reforms are the best
preventives of violent Revolutions. If Governments are determined that
the people shall have no redress, no remedies for their acknowledged
grievances, but violent and desperate ones, they may thank themselves
for the obvious consequences. Despotism must always have the most to
fear from the re-action of popular fury, where it has been guilty of the
greatest abuses of power, and where it has shewn the greatest
tenaciousness of those abuses, putting an end to all prospect of
amicable arrangement, and provoking the utmost vengeance of its
oppressed and insulted victims. This tenaciousness of power is the chief
obstacle to improvement, and the cause of the revulsions which follow
the attempts at it. In America, a free Government was easy of
accomplishment, because it was not necessary, in building up, to pull
down: there were no nuisances to abate. The thing is plain. Reform in
old Governments is just like the new improvements in the front of
Carlton House, that would go on fast enough but for the vile, old, dark,
dirty, crooked streets, which cannot be removed without giving the
inhabitants notice to quit. Mr. Burke, in regretting these old
institutions as the result of the wisdom of ages, and not the remains of
Gothic ignorance and barbarism, played the part of _Crockery_, in the
farce of _Exit by Mistake_, who sheds tears of affection over the loss
of the old windows and buttresses of the houses that no longer jut out
to meet one another, and stop up the way.
There is one other consideration which may induce hereditary Sovereigns
to allow some weight to the arguments in favour of popular feeling and
public opinion. They are the only security which they themselves possess
individually for the continuance of their splendour and power. Absolute
monarchs have nothing to fear from the people, but they have every thing
to fear from their slaves and one another. Where power is lifted beyond
the reach of the law or of public opinion, there is no principle to
oppose it, and he who can obtain possession of the throne (by whatever
means) is always the rightful possessor of it, till he is supplanted by
a more fortunate or artful successor, and so on in a perpetual round of
treasons, conspiracies, murders, usurpations, regicides, and rebellions,
with which the people have nothing to do, but as passive, unconcerned
spectators.—Where the son succeeds to the father’s throne by
assassination, without being amenable to public justice, he is liable to
be cut off himself by the same means, and with the same impunity. The
only thing that can give stability or confidence to power, is that very
will of the people, and public censure exercised upon public acts, of
which legitimate Sovereigns are so disproportionately apprehensive. For
one regicide committed by the people, there have been thousands
committed by Kings themselves. A Constitutional King of England reigns
in greater security than the Persian Sophi, or the Great Mogul; and the
Emperor of Turkey, or the Autocrat of all the Russias, has much more to
fear from a cup of coffee or the bowstring, than the Prince Regent from
the speeches and writings of all the Revolutionists in Europe. By
removing the barrier of public opinion, which interferes with their own
lawless acts, despotic Kings lay themselves open to the hand of the
assassin,—and while they reign in contempt of the will, the voice, the
heart and mind of a whole people, hold their crowns, and every moment of
their lives at the mercy of the meanest of their slaves.
ON THE REGAL CHARACTER
_May 16, 1818._
This is a subject exceedingly curious, and worth explaining. In writing
a criticism, we hope we shall not be accused of intending a libel.
Kings are remarkable for long memories, in the merest trifles. They
never forget a face or person they have once seen, nor an anecdote they
have been told of any one they know. Whatever differences of character
or understanding they manifest in other respects, they all possess what
Dr. Spurzheim would call the _organ of individuality_, or the power of
recollecting particular local circumstances, nearly in the same degree;
though we shall attempt to account for it without recurring to his
system. This kind of personal memory is the natural effect of that
self-importance which makes them attach a corresponding importance to
all that comes in contact with themselves. Nothing can be a matter of
indifference to a King, that happens to a King. That intense
consciousness of their personal identity, which never quits them,
extends to whatever falls under their immediate cognisance. It is the
glare of Majesty reflected from their own persons on the persons of
those about them that fixes their attention; and it is the same false
glare that makes them blind and insensible to all that lies beyond that
narrow sphere. ‘My Lord,’ said an English King to one of his courtiers,
‘I have seen you in that coat before with different buttons’—to the
astonishment of the Noble Peer. There was nothing wonderful in it. It
was the habitual jealousy of the Sovereign of the respect due to him,
that made him regard with lynx-eyed watchfulness even the accidental
change of dress in one of his favourites. The least diminution of glossy
splendour in a birth-day suit, considered as a mark of slackened duty,
or waning loyalty, would expose it, tarnished and thread-bare, to the
keen glance of dormant pride, waked to suspicion. A God does not
penetrate into the hearts of his worshippers with surer insight, than a
King, fond of the attributes of awe and sovereignty, detects the
different degrees of hollow adulation in those around him. Every thing
relating to external appearance and deportment is scanned with the
utmost nicety, as compromising the dignity of the royal presence.
Involuntary gestures become overt acts; a look is construed into high
treason; an inconsiderate word is magnified into a crime against the
State. To suggest advice, or offer information unasked, is to arraign
the fallibility of the throne: to hint a difference of opinion to a
King, would create as great a shock, as if you were to present a pistol
to the breast of any other man. ‘Never touch a King,’ was the answer of
an infirm Monarch to one who had saved him from a dangerous fall. When a
glass of wine was presented to the Emperor Alexander by a servant in
livery, he started, as if he had trod upon a serpent. Such is their
respect for themselves! Such is their contempt for human
nature!—‘There’s a divinity doth hedge a King,’ that keeps their bodies
and their minds sacred within the magic circle of a name; and it is
their fear lest this circle should be violated or approached without
sufficient awe, that makes them observe and remember the countenances
and demeanour of others with such infinite circumspection and exactness.
As Kings have the sagacity of pride, courtiers have the cunning of fear.
They watch their own behaviour and that of others with breathless
apprehension, and move amidst the artificial forms of court-etiquette,
as if the least error must be fatal to them. Their sense of personal
propriety is heightened by servility: every faculty is wound up to
flatter the vanity and prejudices of their superiors. When Coates
painted a portrait in crayons of the Queen, on her first arrival in this
country, the King, followed by a train of attendants, went to look at
it. The trembling artist stood by. ‘Well, what do you think?’ said the
King to those in waiting. Not a word in reply. ‘Do you think it like?’
Still all was hushed as death. ‘Why, yes, I think it is like, very
like.’ A buzz of admiration instantly filled the room; and the old
Duchess of Northumberland, going up to the artist, and tapping him
familiarly on the shoulder, said, ‘Remember, Mr. Coates, I am to have
the first copy.’ On another occasion, when the Queen had sat for her
portrait, one of the Maids of Honour coming into the room, curtsied to
the reflection in the glass, affecting to mistake it for the Queen. The
picture was, you may be sure, a flattering likeness. In the ‘Memoirs of
Count Grammont,’ it is related of Louis XIV. that having a dispute at
chess with one of his courtiers, no one present would give an opinion.
‘Oh!’ said he, ‘here comes Count Hamilton, he shall decide which of us
is in the right.’ ‘Your Majesty is in the wrong,’ replied the Count,
without looking at the board. On which, the King remonstrating with him
on the impossibility of his judging till he saw the state of the game,
he answered, ‘Does your Majesty suppose that if you were in the right,
all these noblemen would stand by and say nothing?’ A King was once
curious to know, which was the tallest, himself or a certain courtier.
‘Let us measure,’ said the King. The King stood up to be measured first;
but when the person who was fixed upon to take their height came to
measure the Nobleman, he found it quite impossible, as he first rose on
tip-toe, then crouched down, now shrugged up his shoulders to the right,
then twisted his body to the left. Afterwards his friend asking him the
reason of these unaccountable gesticulations, he replied, ‘I could not
tell whether the King wished me to be taller or shorter than himself;
and all the time I was making those odd movements, I was watching his
countenance to see what I ought to do.’ If such is the exquisite
pliability of the inmates of a court in trifles like these, what must be
their independence of spirit and disinterested integrity in questions of
peace and war, that involve the rights of Sovereigns or the liberties of
the people! It has been suggested (and not without reason), that the
difficulty of trusting to the professions of those who surround them, is
one circumstance that renders Kings such expert physiognomists, the
language of the countenance being the only one they have left to
decypher the thoughts of others; and the very disguises which are
practised to prevent the emotions of the mind from appearing in the
face, only rendering them more acute and discriminating observers. It is
the same insincerity and fear of giving offence by candour and
plain-speaking in their immediate dependents, that makes Kings gossips
and inquisitive. They have no way of ascertaining the opinions of
others, but by getting them up into a corner, and extorting the
commonest information from them, piecemeal, by endless teasing tiresome
questions, and cross-examination. The walls of a palace, like those of a
nunnery, are the favoured abode of scandal and tittle-tattle. The
inhabitants of both are equally shut out from the common privileges and
common incidents of humanity, and whatever relates to the every-day
world about us, has to them the air of a romance. The desire which the
most meritorious Princes have shewn to acquire information on matters of
fact rather than of opinion, is partly because their prejudices will not
suffer them to exercise their understandings freely on the most
important speculative questions, partly from their jealousy of being
dictated to on any point that admits of a question;—as, on the other
hand, the desire which the Sovereigns of northern and uncultivated
kingdoms have shewn to become acquainted with the arts and elegances of
life in southern nations, is evidently owing to their natural jealousy
of the advantages of civilization over barbarism. From the principle
last stated, Peter the Great visited this country, and worked in our
dock-yards as a common shipwright. To the same source may be traced the
curiosity of the Duchess of Oldenburgh to see a beef-steak cooked, to
take a peep into Mr. Meux’s great brewing-vat, and to hear Mr. Whitbread
speak!
The common regal character is then the reverse of what it ought to be.
It is the purely _personal_, occupied with its own petty feelings,
prejudices, and pursuits; whereas it ought to be the purely
philosophical, exempt from all personal considerations, and
contemplating itself only in its general and paramount relation to the
State. This is the reason why there have been so few great Kings. They
want the power of abstraction: and their situations are necessarily at
variance with their duties, in this respect; for every thing forces them
to concentrate their attention upon themselves, and to consider their
rank and privileges in connexion with their private advantage, rather
than with public good. This is but natural. It is easier to employ the
power they possess in pampering their own appetites and passions, than
to wield it for the benefit of a great empire. They see well enough how
the community is made for them, not so well how they are made for the
community. Not knowing how to act as stewards for their trust, they set
up for heirs to the estate, and waste it at their pleasure:—without
aspiring to reign as Kings, they are contented to live as _spunges_ upon
royalty. A great King ought to be the greatest philosopher and the
truest patriot in his dominions: hereditary Kings can be but common
mortals. It is not that they are not equal to other men, but to be equal
to their rank as Kings, they ought to be more than men. Their power is
equal to that of the whole community: their wisdom and virtue ought to
keep pace with their power. But in ordinary cases, the height to which
they are raised, instead of enlarging their views or ennobling their
sentiments, makes them giddy with vanity, and ready to look down on the
world which is subjected to their power, as the plaything of their will.
They regard men crawling on the face of the earth, as we do insects that
cross our path, and survey the common drama of human life, as a
fantoccini exhibition got up for their amusement. There is no sympathy
between Kings and their subjects—except in a constitutional monarchy
like ours, through the medium of Lords and Commons! Take away that check
upon their ambition and rapacity, and their pretensions become as
monstrous as they are ridiculous. Without the common feelings of
humanity in their own breasts, they have no regard for them in their
aggregate amount and accumulating force. Reigning in contempt of the
people, they would crush and trample upon all power but their own. They
consider the claims of justice and compassion as so many impertinent
interferences with the royal prerogative. They despise the millions of
slaves whom they see linked to the foot of the throne; and they soon
hate what they despise. They will sacrifice a kingdom for a caprice, and
mankind for a bauble. Weighed in the scales of their pride, the meanest
things become of the greatest importance: weighed in the balance of
reason, the universe is nothing to them. It is this overweening,
aggravated, intolerable sense of swelling pride and ungovernable
self-will, that so often drives them mad; as it is their blind fatuity
and insensibility to all beyond themselves, that, transmitted through
successive generations and confirmed by regal intermarriages, in time
makes them idiots. When we see a poor creature like Ferdinand VII., who
can hardly gabble out his words like a human being, more imbecile than a
woman, more hypocritical than a priest, decked and dandled in the long
robes and swaddling-clothes of legitimacy, lullabied to rest with the
dreams of superstition, drunk with the patriot blood of his country, and
launching the thunders of his coward-arm against the rising liberties of
a new world, while he claims the style and title of Image of the
Divinity, we may laugh or weep, but there is nothing to wonder at.
Tyrants lose all respect for humanity in proportion as they are sunk
beneath it;—taught to believe themselves of a different species, they
really become so; lose their participation with their kind; and, in
mimicking the God, dwindle into the brute! Blind with prejudices as a
mole, stung with truth as with scorpions, sore all over with wounded
pride like a boil, their minds a heap of morbid proud flesh and bloated
humours, a disease and gangrene in the State, instead of its life-blood
and vital principle;—foreign despots claim mankind as their property,
‘independently of their conduct or merits,’ and there is one Englishman
found base enough to echo the foul calumny against his country and his
kind.
We might, in the same manner, account for the disparity between the
public and private character of Kings. It is the misfortune of most
Kings (not their fault) to be born to thrones, a situation which
ordinary talents or virtue cannot fill with impunity. We often find a
very respectable man make but a very sorry figure as a Sovereign. Nay, a
Prince may be possessed of extraordinary virtues and accomplishments,
and not be the more thought of for them. He may, for instance, be a man
of good nature and good manners, graceful in his person, the idol of the
other sex, the model of his own; every word or look may be marked with
the utmost sense of propriety and delicate attention to the feelings of
others; he may be a good classic, well versed in history,—may speak
Italian, French, Spanish, and German fluently; he may be an excellent
mimic; he may say good things, and do friendly ones; he may be able to
join in a catch, or utter a repartee, or dictate a billet-doux; he may
be master of Hoyle, and deep in the rules of the Jockey club; he may
have an equal taste in ragouts and poetry, in dancing and in dress; he
may adjust a toupee with the dexterity of a friseur, or tie a cravat
with the hand and eye of a man-milliner: he may have all these graces
and accomplishments, and as many more, and yet he may be nothing; as
without any one of them he may be a great Prince. They are not the
graces and accomplishments of a Sovereign, but of a lord of the
bed-chamber. They do not shew a great mind, bent on great objects, and
swayed by lofty views. They are rather foibles and blemishes in the
character of a ruler, for they imply that his attention has been turned
as much upon adorning his own person as upon advancing the State.
Charles II. was a King, such as we have here described; amiable, witty,
and accomplished, and yet his memory is equally despised and detested.
Charles was without strength of mind, or public principle. He could not
arrive at the comprehension of that mixed mass of thought and feeling, a
_kingdom_—he thought merely of the _throne_. He was as unlike Cromwell
in the manner in which he came by the sovereignty of the realm as in the
use he made of it. He saw himself, not in the glass of history, but in
the glass on his toilette; not in the eyes of posterity, but in those of
his courtiers and mistresses. Instead of regulating his conduct by
public opinion and abstract reason, he did every thing from a feeling of
personal vanity. Charles would have been more annoyed with the rejection
of a licentious overture than with the rebellion of a province; and
poured out the blood of his subjects with the same gaiety and
indifference as he did a glass of wine. He had no idea of his
obligations to the State, and only laid aside the private gentleman, to
become the tyrant of his people. Charles was popular in his life-time,
Cibber tells us, because he used to walk out with his spaniels and feed
his ducks in St. James’s park. History has consigned his name to infamy
for the executions under Jefferies, and for his league with a legitimate
despot (Louis XIV.), to undermine the liberties of his country.
What is it, then, that makes a great Prince? Not the understanding
Purcell or Mozart, but the having an ear open to the voice of truth and
justice! Not a taste in made dishes, or French wines, or court-dresses,
but a fellow-feeling with the calamities of hunger, of cold, of disease,
and nakedness! Not a knowledge of the elegances of fashionable life, but
a heart that feels for the millions of its fellow-beings in want of the
common necessaries of life! Not a set of brilliant frivolous
accomplishments, but a manly strength of character, proof against the
seductions of a throne! He, in short, is a patriot King, who without any
other faculty usually possessed by Sovereigns, has one which they seldom
possess,—the power in imagination of changing places with his people.
Such a King may indeed aspire to the character of a ruling providence
over a nation; any other is but the head-cypher of a court.
THE FUDGE FAMILY IN PARIS
_Edited by_ Thomas Brown, _the younger_, _Author of the ‘Twopenny
Post-bag_.’—Longmans.
_April 25, 1818._
The spirit of poetry in Mr. Moore is not a lying spirit. ‘Set it down,
my tables’—we have still, in the year 1818, three years after the date
of Mr. Southey’s laureateship, one poet, who is an honest man. We are
glad of it: nor does it spoil our theory, for the exception proves the
rule. Mr. Moore unites in himself two names that were sacred, till they
were prostituted by our modern mountebanks, the Poet and the Patriot. He
is neither a coxcomb nor a catspaw,—a whiffling turncoat, nor a
thorough-paced tool, a mouthing sycophant, ‘a full solempne man,’ like
Mr. Wordsworth,—a whining monk, like Mr. Southey,—a maudlin
Methodistical lay-preacher, like Mr. Coleridge,—a merry Andrew, like the
fellow that plays on the salt-box at Bartlemy Fair,—or the more pitiful
jack-pudding, that makes a jest of humanity in St. Stephen’s Chapel.
Thank God, he is like none of these—he is not one of the Fudge Family.
He is neither a bubble nor a cheat. He makes it his business neither to
hoodwink his own understanding, nor to blind or gag others. He is a man
of wit and fancy, but he does not sharpen his wit on the edge of human
agony, like the House of Commons’ jester, nor strew the flowers of
fancy, like the Jesuit Burke, over the carcase of corruption, for he is
a man not only of wit and fancy, but of common sense and common
humanity. He sees for himself, and he feels for others. He employs the
arts of fiction, not to adorn the deformed, or disguise the false, but
to make truth shine out the clearer, and beauty look more beautiful. He
does not make verse, ‘immortal verse,’ the vehicle of lies, the bawd of
Legitimacy, the pander of antiquated prejudices, and of vamped-up
sophistry; but of truths, of home, heartfelt truths, as old as human
nature and its wrongs. Mr. Moore calls things by their right names: he
shews us kings as kings, priests as priests, knaves as knaves, and fools
as fools. He makes us laugh at the ridiculous, and hate the odious. He
also speaks with authority, and not as certain scribes that we could
mention. He has been at Court, and has seen what passes there.
‘Tam knew what’s what full brawly.’
But he was a man before he became a courtier, and has continued to be
one afterwards; nor has he forgotten what passes in the human heart.
From what he says of the Prince, it is evident that he speaks from
habits of personal intimacy: he speaks of Lord Castlereagh as his
countryman. In the Epistles of the Fudge Family, we see, as in a glass
without a wrinkle, the mind and person of Royalty in full dress, up to
the very throat, and we have a whole-length figure of his Lordship, in
the sweeping, serpentine line of beauty, down to his very feet.[50]—We
have heard it said of our poet, by a late celebrated wit and orator,
that ‘there was no man who put so much of his heart into his fancy as
Tom Moore; that his soul seemed as if it were a particle of fire
separated from the sun, and were always fluttering to get back to that
source of light and heat.’ We think this criticism as happy as it is
just: but it will be evident to the readers of the _Fudge Family_,
that the soul of ‘a certain little gentleman’ is not attracted with
the same lively or kindly symptoms to the Bourbons, or to their
benefactors and restorers ‘under Providence!’ The title of this
delightful little collection of sweets and bitters, of honey and gall,
is, we suppose, an allusion to the short ejaculation which honest
Burchell, in the ‘Vicar of Wakefield,’ uttered at the end of every
sentence, in the conversation of Miss Amelia Carolina Wilhelmina
Skeggs and her friend, on the Court and Fashionables; and which word,
‘Fudge,’ our malicious Editor thinks equally applicable to the cant
upon the same subjects at the present day,—to the _fade politesse_ of
the _ancient regime_,—to ‘the damnable face-making’ of Holy Alliances,
and ‘the _flocci-nauci-pili-nihili-fication_’ of Legitimacy. He may be
wrong in this; but if so, we are most assuredly in the wrong with him:
and we confess, it gives us as much pleasure to agree with this
writer, as it does to differ with some others that we could mention,
but that they are not worth mentioning.—The Correspondents of the
Fudge Family in Paris are much of the same stamp (with one exception)
as the Correspondents of Dr. S——, in his work of that name, which was
lately put a stop to by that sort of censorship of the press which is
exercised by the reading public; only the Correspondents in the
present volume have a very different Editor from him of ‘_The Day and
New Times_,’ or, as it is at present called, _The New Times_ alone,
the _Day_ having been left out as an anomaly, ‘_ut lucus a non
lucendo_‘: for the readers of that paper roll their eyes in vain, and
‘find no dawn; but, in its stead, total eclipse and ever-during dark
surrounds them.’—But to return from ‘the professional _gentleman_,’ as
he calls himself, his scavenger’s bell, his mud-cart of liberal
phraseologies, and go-cart of slavery and superstition, to something
as different as genius from dulness, as wit from malice, as sense from
moon-struck madness, as independence from servility, as the
belles-lettres from law-stationery, as Parnassus from Grub-street, or
as the grub from the butterfly,—as the man who winged his airy way
from a Court which was unworthy of him, and which would have made him
unworthy of himself, ‘as light as bird from brake,’ is from the man
(if so he can be called) who would grope his way there on all fours,
bringing, as the sacrifice best worthy of himself and of the place,
his own dignity of spirit and the rights of his fellow-creatures, to
be trampled down by the obscene hoofs of a base oligarchy. But we have
already in another place spoken our minds of that person, in a way to
cut off the communication between his ‘blind mouth’ and the Midas ears
of the Stock Exchange; and we do not wish to deprive him of a
livelihood. He may receive his Treasury wages for us, so that he no
longer levies them on public credulity, and we no longer confound ‘his
sweet voice’ with that of the country or city, though it may echo the
Court. The _New Times_ is a nuisance; but it is not one that requires
to be abated. It speaks a plain, intelligible language. Its principles
are as palpable as they are base. Its pettifogging pedantry and its
Billingsgate slang can deceive nobody that is worth undeceiving. It is
the avowed organ of the deliberate, detestable system which has long
been covertly pursued in a certain quarter. This paper raves aloud,
under the ambiguous garb of phrenzy, what its patrons think in secret.
It proclaims on the house-tops what is whispered in the high places.
It soothes the ears of flatterers, of tyrants, and of slaves,—but it
sounds the alarm to free men. It is so far a great public good. It
tells the people of England what is prepared for them, and what they
have to expect. ‘Nothing is sacred in its pages but tyranny.’ It links
this country in chains of vassalage to the legitimate despotisms of
the Continent, which have been a bye-word with us for ages. It binds
this nation, hand and foot, in the trammels of lasting servitude,—it
puts the yoke upon our necks as we put pack-saddles upon asses,—marks
the brand upon our foreheads as we ruddle over sheep,—binds us in
‘with shame, with rotten parchments, and vile inky blots,’—makes
England, that threw off the yoke of a race of hereditary pretenders,
shew ‘like a rebel’s whore,’ and every morning illegitimates the House
of Brunswick, and strikes at the title of the Prince Regent to the
succession of the Crown, to which his ancestors had no just claim but
the choice of the people. It is not a paper for a free people to
endure, if a people that has oppressed the struggling liberties of
another nation can dare to call itself free; or for the Sovereign of a
free people to look at, if a Prince who had restored a despot to a
throne, in contempt of the voice of the people, could be supposed to
respect the rights of human nature more than his own power. It
reverses the Revolution of 1688, by justifying the claims of the
Bourbons,—brings back Popery and slavery here, by parity of
reasoning,—and sends the illustrious members of the present Royal
Family a packing, as vagabonds and outlaws—by RIGHT DIVINE. If this is
not a legitimate conclusion from the Doctor’s reasoning,—from his
‘brangle and brave-all, discord and debate,’—why then
‘The pillar’d firmament is rottenness,
And earth’s base built on stubble.’
The chief _Dramatis Personæ_: in the _Fudge Family_ are,—Comic
Personages, Miss Biddy Fudge and Mr. Bob Fudge, her brother: Mr. Philip
Fudge, their father, and a friend of Lord Castlereagh, a grave
gentleman; and a Mr. Phelim Connor, who is a patriotic, or, which is the
same thing, a tragic writer. Miss Biddy Fudge takes the account of
poke-bonnets and love-adventures upon herself; Mr. Bob, the _patés_,
jockey-boots, and high collars: Mr. Phil. Fudge addresses himself to the
Lord Viscount Castlereagh; and Mr. Phelim, ‘the sad historian of pensive
Europe,’ appeals, we confess, more effectually to us, in words
‘As precious as the ruddy drops
That visit our sad hearts.’
Take for example the following magnanimous and most heroical Epistle:—
FROM PHELIM CONNOR TO ——
‘Return!’—no never, while the withering hand
Of bigot power is on that helpless land;
While, for the faith my fathers held to God,
Ev’n in the fields where free those fathers trod,
I am proscrib’d, and—like the spot left bare
In Israel’s halls, to tell the proud and fair
Amidst their mirth, that Slavery had been there—
On all I love, home, parents, friends, I trace
The mournful mark of bondage and disgrace!
No!—let _them_ stay, who in their country’s pangs
See nought but food for factions and harangues;
Who yearly kneel before their masters’ doors,
And hawk their wrongs, as beggars do their sores:
Still let your[51] * * * * *
* * * * *
Still hope and suffer, all who can!—but I,
Who durst not hope, and cannot bear, must fly.
But whither?—everywhere the scourge pursues—
Turn where he will, the wretched wanderer views,
In the bright, broken hopes of all his race,
Countless reflections of th’ Oppressor’s face!
Every-where gallant hearts, and spirits true,
Are serv’d up victims to the vile and few;
While E******, everywhere—the general foe
Of Truth and Freedom, wheresoe’er they glow—
Is first, when tyrants strike, to aid the blow!
Oh, E******! could such poor revenge atone
For wrongs, that well might claim the deadliest one;
Were it a vengeance, sweet enough to sate
The wretch who flies from thy intolerant hate,
To hear his curses on such barbarous sway
Echoed, where’er he bends his cheerless way;—
Could _this_ content him, every lip he meets
Teems for his vengeance with such poisonous sweets;
Were _this_ his luxury, never is thy name
Pronounc’d, but he doth banquet on thy shame;
Hears maledictions ring from every side
Upon that grasping power, that selfish pride,
Which vaunts its own, and scorns all rights beside;
That low and desperate envy, which to blast
A neighbour’s blessings, risks the few thou hast;—
That monster, Self, too gross to be conceal’d
Which ever lurks behind thy proffer’d shield;—
That faithless craft, which in thy hour of need,
Can court the slave, can swear he shall be freed,
Yet basely spurns him, when thy point is gain’d,
Back to his masters, ready gagg’d and chain’d!
Worthy associate of that band of Kings,
That royal, rav’ning flock, whose vampire wings
O’er sleeping Europe treacherously brood,
And fan her into dreams of promis’d good,
Of hope, of freedom—but to drain her blood!
If _thus_ to hear thee branded be a bliss
That Vengeance loves, there’s yet more sweet than this,—
That ’twas an Irish head, an Irish heart,
Made thee the fall’n and tarnish’d thing thou art;
That, as the Centaur gave th’ infected vest
In which he died, to rack his conqueror’s breast,
We send thee C——gh:—as heaps of dead
Have slain their slayers by the pest they spread,
So hath our land breath’d out—thy fame to dim,
Thy strength to waste, and rot thee, soul and limb—
Her worst infections all condens’d in him!
* * * * *
When will the world shake off such yokes? Oh, when
Will that redeeming day shine out on men,
That shall behold them rise, erect and free
As Heav’n and Nature meant mankind should be?
When Reason shall no longer blindly bow
To the vile pagod things, that o’er her brow,
Like him of Jaghernaut, drive trampling now;
Nor conquest dare to desolate God’s earth;
Nor drunken Victory, with a Nero’s mirth,
Strike her lewd harp amidst a people’s groans;—
But, built on love, the world’s exalted thrones
Shall to the virtuous and the wise be given—
Those bright, those sole Legitimates of Heaven!
_When_ will this be?—or, oh! is it, in truth,
But one of those sweet, day-break dreams of youth,
In which the Soul, as round her morning springs,
’Twixt sleep and waking, sees such dazzling things!
And must the hope, as vain as it is bright,
Be all giv’n up?—and are _they_ only right,
Who say this world of thinking souls was made
To be by Kings partition’d, truck’d, and weigh’d
In scales that, ever since the world begun,
Have counted millions but as dust to one?
Are _they_ the only wise, who laugh to scorn
The rights, the freedom to which man was born;
Who * * * * *
* * * * *
Who, proud to kiss each separate rod of power,
Bless, while he reigns, the minion of the hour;
Worship each would-be God, that o’er them moves,
And take the thundering of his brass for Jove’s!
If _this_ be wisdom, then farewell my books,
Farewell ye shrines of old, ye classic brooks,
Which fed my soul with currents, pure and fair,
Of living truth, that now must stagnate there!—
Instead of themes that touch the lyre with light,—
Instead of Greece, and her immortal fight
For Liberty, which once awak’d my strings,
Welcome the Grand Conspiracy of Kings,
The High Legitimates, the Holy Band,
Who, bolder ev’n than He of Sparta’s land,
Against whole millions, panting to be free,
Would guard the pass of right-line tyranny!
Instead of him, th’ Athenian bard, whose blade
Had stood the onset which his pen pourtray’d,
Welcome * * * * *
* * * * *
And, ‘stead of Aristides—woe the day
Such names should mingle!—welcome C——gh!
Here break we off, at this unhallow’d name,
Like priests of old, when words ill-omen’d came.
My next shall tell thee, bitterly shall tell,
Thoughts that * * * * *
* * * * *
Thoughts that—could patience hold—’twere wiser far
To leave still hid and burning where they are!
_Indignatio facit versus._ Mr. Moore’s better genius is here his spleen.
The politician sharpens the poet’s pen. Poor Phelim resumes this subject
twice afterwards, and the last time with such force and spirit, that he
is compelled to break off in the middle, for fear of consequences. But
as far as he goes, we will accompany him.
Yes—’twas a cause, as noble and as great
As ever hero died to vindicate—
A Nation’s right to speak a Nation’s voice,
And own no power but of the Nation’s choice!
Such was the grand, the glorious cause that now
Hung trembling on Napoleon’s single brow;
Such the sublime arbitrement, that pour’d,
In patriot eyes, a light around his sword,
A glory then, which never, since the day
Of his young victories, had illum’d its way!
Oh, ’twas not then the time for tame debates,
Ye men of Gaul, when chains were at your gates;
When he, who fled before your Chieftain’s eye,
As geese from eagles on Mount Taurus fly,
Denounc’d against the land, that spurn’d his chain,
Myriads of swords to bind it fast again—
Myriads of fierce invading swords, to track
Through your best blood, his path of vengeance back;
When Europe’s Kings, that never yet combin’d
But (like those upper Stars, that, when conjoin’d,
Shed woe and pestilence) to scourge mankind,
Gather’d around, with hosts from every shore,
Hating Napoleon much, but Freedom more;
And, in that coming strife, appall’d to see
The world yet left one chance for liberty!—
No, ’twas not then the time to weave a net
Of bondage round your Chief; to curb and fret
Your veteran war-horse, pawing for the fight,
When every hope was in his speed and might—
To waste the hour of action in dispute,
And coolly plan how Freedom’s _boughs_ should shoot,
When your invader’s axe was at the _root_!
No, sacred Liberty! that God, who throws
Thy light around, like his own sunshine, knows
How well I love thee, and how deeply hate
_All_ tyrants, upstart and Legitimate—
Yet, in that hour, were France my native land,
I would have followed, with quick heart and hand,
Napoleon, Nero—ay, no matter whom—
To snatch my country from that damning doom,—
That deadliest curse that on the conquered waits—
A Conqueror’s satrap, thron’d within her gates!
True, he was false, despotic—all you please—
Had trampled down man’s holiest liberties—
Had, by a genius form’d for nobler things
Than lie within the grasp of _vulgar_ Kings,
But rais’d the hopes of men—as eaglets fly
With tortoises aloft into the sky—
To dash them down again more shatteringly!
All this I own—but still[52] * * * * *
* * * * *
All is not in this high-wrought strain, which we like as well as the War
Eclogues of Tyrtæus, or the Birth-day Odes (which seem also to have
broke off in the middle) of Mr. Southey. Mr. Thomas Brown the Younger,
is a man of humanity, as Mr. Southey formerly was: he is also a man of
wit, which Mr. Southey is not. For instance, Miss Biddy Fudge, in her
first letter, writes as follows:—
By the bye though at Calais, Papa had a touch
Of romance on the pier, which affected me much.
At the sight of that spot, where our darling Dixhuit,
Set the first of his own dear legitimate feet.[53]
(Modell’d out so exactly, and—God bless the mark!
’Tis a foot, Dolly, worthy so _Grand_ a _Monarque_)
He exclaim’d, ‘Oh mon Roi!’ and, with tear-dropping eye,
Stood to gaze on the spot—while some Jacobin nigh,
Mutter’d out with a shrug (what an insolent thing!)
‘Ma foi, he be right—’tis de Englishman’s King;
And dat _gros pied de cochon_—begar, me vil say
Dat de foot look mosh better, if turn’d toder way.’
Mr. Phil. Fudge, in his dreams, thinks of a plan for changing heads.
Good Viscount S—dm—th, too, instead
Of his own grave, respected head,
Might wear (for aught I see that bars)
Old Lady Wilhelmina Frump’s—
So while the hand sign’d _Circulars_,
The head might lisp out ‘What is trumps?’
The R—g—t’s brains could we transfer
To some robust man-milliner,
The shop, the shears, the lace, and ribbon,
Would go, I doubt not, quite as glib on;
And, _vice versâ_, take the pains
To give the P—ce the shopman’s brains,
The only change from thence would flow,
_Ribbons_ would not be wasted so!
Or here is another proposal for weighing the head of the State;
Suppose, my Lord,—and far from me
To treat such things with levity—
But just suppose the R—g—t’s weight
Were made thus an affair of state;
And, ev’ry sessions, at the close,
‘Stead of a speech, which, all can see, is
Heavy and dull enough, God knows—
We were to try how heavy _he_ is.
Much would it glad all hearts to hear
That, while the Nation’s Revenue
Loses so many pounds a year,
The P——e, God bless him! _gains_ a few.
With bales of muslin, chintzes, spices,
I see the Easterns weigh their Kings;—
But, for the R—g—t, my advice is,
We should throw in much _heavier_ things:
For instance, —— ——‘s quarto volumes,
Which, though not spices, serve to wrap them;
_Dominie_ St—dd—t’s Daily columns,
‘Prodigious!’—in, of course we’d clap them—
Letters, that C—rtw—t’s pen indites,
In which, with logical confusion,
The _Major_ like a _Minor_ writes,
And never comes to a _conclusion_:
Lord S—m—rs’ pamphlet, or his head—
(Ah, _that_ were worth its weight in lead!)
Along with which we _in_ may whip, sly,
The Speeches of Sir John C—x H—pp—sly;
That Baronet of many words,
Who loves so, in the House of Lords,
To whisper Bishops—and so nigh
Unto their wigs in whisp’ring goes,
That you may always know him by
A patch of powder on his nose!—
If this won’t do, we must in cram
The ‘Reasons’ of Lord B—ck—gh—m;
(A book his Lordship means to write,
Entitled, ‘Reasons for my Ratting’:)
Or, should these prove too small and light,
His ——‘s a host, we’ll bundle _that_ in!
And, _still_ should all these masses fail
To stir the R—g—t’s ponderous scale,
Why then, my Lord, in heaven’s name,
Pitch in, without reserve or stint,
The whole of R—g—ly’s beauteous dame—
If that won’t raise him, devil’s in’t.
But we stop here, or we shall quote the whole work. We like the
political part of this _jeu d’esprit_ better, on the whole, than the
merely comic and familiar. Bob Fudge is almost too suffocating a
coxcomb, even in description, with his stays and _patés_; and Miss Biddy
Fudge, with her _poke_ bonnet and her princely lover, who turned out to
be no better than a man-milliner, is not half so interesting as a
certain Marchioness in the Twopenny Post Bag, with curls ‘in the manner
of Ackermann’s dresses for May, and her yellow charioteer.’ Besides,
Miss Biddy’s amour ends in nothing. In short, the Fudges abroad are not
such fat subjects for ridicule as the Fudges at home. ‘They do not cut
up so well in the cawl; they do not tallow so in the kidneys:’ but as
far as they go, Mr. Brown, Junior, uses the dissecting knife with equal
dexterity, and equally to the delight and edification of the
byestanders.
CHARACTER OF LORD CHATHAM
1807.
Lord Chatham’s genius burnt brightest at the last. The spark of liberty,
which had lain concealed and dormant, buried under the dirt and rubbish
of state intrigue and vulgar faction, now met with congenial matter, and
kindled up ‘a flame of sacred vehemence’ in his breast. It burst forth
with a fury and a splendour that might have awed the world, and made
kings tremble. He spoke as a man should speak, because he felt as a man
should feel, in such circumstances. He came forward as the advocate of
liberty, as the defender of the rights of his fellow-citizens, as the
enemy of tyranny, as the friend of his country, and of mankind. He did
not stand up to make a vain display of his talents, but to discharge a
duty, to maintain that cause which lay nearest to his heart, to preserve
the ark of the British constitution from every sacrilegious touch, as
the high-priest of his calling, with a pious zeal. The feelings and the
rights of Englishmen were enshrined in his heart; and with their united
force braced every nerve, possessed every faculty, and communicated
warmth and vital energy to every part of his being. The whole man moved
under this impulse. He felt the cause of liberty as his own. He resented
every injury done to her as an injury to himself, and every attempt to
defend it as an insult upon his understanding. He did not stay to
dispute about words, about nice distinctions, about trifling forms. He
laughed at the little attempts of little retailers of logic to entangle
him in senseless argument. He did not come there as to a debating club,
or law court, to start questions and hunt them down; to wind and unwind
the web of sophistry; to pick out the threads, and untie every knot with
scrupulous exactness; to bandy logic with every pretender to a paradox;
to examine, to sift evidence; to dissect a doubt and halve a scruple; to
weigh folly and knavery in scales together, and see on which side the
balance preponderated; to prove that liberty, truth, virtue, and justice
were good things, or that slavery and corruption were bad things. He did
not try to prove those truths which did not require any proof, but to
make others feel them with the same force that he did; and to tear off
the flimsy disguises with which the sycophants of power attempted to
cover them.—The business of an orator is not to convince, but persuade;
not to inform, but to rouse the mind; to build upon the habitual
prejudices of mankind, (for reason of itself will do nothing,) and to
add feeling to prejudice, and action to feeling. There is nothing new or
curious or profound in Lord Chatham’s speeches. All is obvious and
common; there is nothing but what we already knew, or might have found
out for ourselves. We see nothing but the familiar every-day face of
nature. We are always in broad day-light. But then there is the same
difference between our own conceptions of things and his representation
of them, as there is between the same objects seen on a dull cloudy day,
or in the blaze of sunshine. His common sense has the effect of
inspiration. He electrifies his hearers, not by the novelty of his
ideas, but by their force and intensity. He has the same ideas as other
men, but he has them in a thousand times greater clearness and strength
and vividness. Perhaps there is no man so poorly furnished with thoughts
and feelings but that if he could recollect all that he knew, and had
all his ideas at perfect command, he would be able to confound the puny
arts of the most dexterous sophist that pretended to make a dupe of his
understanding. But in the mind of Chatham, the great substantial truths
of common sense, the leading maxims of the Constitution, the real
interests and general feelings of mankind, were in a manner embodied. He
comprehended the whole of his subject at a single glance—every thing was
firmly rivetted to its place; there was no feebleness, no forgetfulness,
no pause, no distraction; the ardour of his mind overcame every
obstacle, and he crushed the objections of his adversaries as we crush
an insect under our feet.—His imagination was of the same character with
his understanding, and was under the same guidance. Whenever he gave way
to it, it ‘flew an eagle flight, forth and right on’; but it did not
become enamoured of its own motion, wantoning in giddy circles, or
‘sailing with supreme dominion through the azure deep of air.’ It never
forgot its errand, but went strait forward, like an arrow to its mark,
with an unerring aim. It was his servant, not his master.
To be a great orator does not require the highest faculties of the human
mind, but it requires the highest exertion of the common faculties of
our nature. He has no occasion to dive into the depths of science, or to
soar aloft on angels’ wings. He keeps upon the surface, he stands firm
upon the ground, but his form is majestic, and his eye sees far and
near: he moves among his fellows, but he moves among them as a giant
among common men. He has no need to read the heavens, to unfold the
system of the universe, or create new worlds for the delighted fancy to
dwell in; it is enough that he sees things as they are; that he knows
and feels and remembers the common circumstances and daily transactions
that are passing in the world around him. He is not raised above others
by being superior to the common interests, prejudices, and passions of
mankind, but by feeling them in a more intense degree than they do.
Force then is the sole characteristic excellence of an orator; it is
almost the only one that can be of any service to him. Refinement,
depth, elevation, delicacy, originality, ingenuity, invention, are not
wanted: he must appeal to the sympathies of human nature, and whatever
is not founded in these, is foreign to his purpose. He does not create,
he can only imitate or echo back the public sentiment. His object is to
call up the feelings of the human breast; but he cannot call up what is
not already there. The first duty of an orator is to be understood by
every one; but it is evident that what all can understand, is not in
itself difficult of comprehension. He cannot add any thing to the
materials afforded him by the knowledge and experience of others.
Lord Chatham, in his speeches, was neither philosopher nor poet. As to
the latter, the difference between poetry and eloquence I take to be
this: that the object of the one is to delight the imagination, that of
the other to impel the will. The one ought to enrich and feed the mind
itself with tenderness and beauty, the other furnishes it with motives
of action. The one seeks to give immediate pleasure, to make the mind
dwell with rapture on its own workings—it is to itself ‘both end and
use’: the other endeavours to call up such images as will produce the
strongest effect upon the mind, and makes use of the passions only as
instruments to attain a particular purpose. The poet lulls and soothes
the mind into a forgetfulness of itself, and ‘laps it in Elysium’: the
orator strives to awaken it to a sense of its real interests, and to
make it feel the necessity of taking the most effectual means for
securing them. The one dwells in an ideal world; the other is only
conversant about realities. Hence poetry must be more ornamented, must
be richer and fuller and more delicate, because it is at liberty to
select whatever images are naturally most beautiful, and likely to give
most pleasure; whereas the orator is confined to particular facts, which
he may adorn as well as he can, and make the most of, but which he
cannot strain beyond a certain point without running into extravagance
and affectation, and losing his end. However, from the very nature of
the case, the orator is allowed a greater latitude, and is compelled to
make use of harsher and more abrupt combinations in the decoration of
his subject; for his art is an attempt to reconcile beauty and deformity
together: on the contrary, the materials of poetry, which are chosen at
pleasure, are in themselves beautiful, and naturally combine with
whatever else is beautiful. Grace and harmony are therefore essential to
poetry, because they naturally arise out of the subject; but whatever
adds to the effect, whatever tends to strengthen the idea or give energy
to the mind, is of the nature of eloquence. The orator is only concerned
to give a tone of masculine firmness to the will, to brace the sinews
and muscles of the mind; not to delight our nervous sensibilities, or
soften the mind into voluptuous indolence. The flowery and sentimental
style is of all others the most intolerable in a speaker.—I shall only
add on this subject, that modesty, impartiality, and candour, are not
the virtues of a public speaker. He must be confident, inflexible,
uncontrolable, overcoming all opposition by his ardour and impetuosity.
We do not _command_ others by sympathy with them, but by power, by
passion, by will. Calm inquiry, sober truth, and speculative
indifference will never carry any point. The passions are contagious;
and we cannot contend against opposite passions with nothing but naked
reason. Concessions to an enemy are clear loss: he will take advantage
of them, but make us none in return. He will magnify the weak sides of
our argument, but will be blind to whatever makes against himself. The
multitude will always be inclined to side with that party, whose
passions are the most inflamed, and whose prejudices are the most
inveterate. Passion should therefore never be sacrificed to punctilio.
It should indeed be governed by prudence, but it should itself govern
and lend its impulse and direction to abstract reason. Fox was a
reasoner, Lord Chatham was an orator. Burke was both a reasoner and a
poet; and was therefore still farther removed from that conformity with
the vulgar notions and mechanical feelings of mankind, which will always
be necessary to give a man the chief sway in a popular assembly.
CHARACTER OF MR. BURKE, 1807[54]
The following speech is perhaps the fairest specimen I could give of Mr.
Burke’s various talents as a speaker. The subject itself is not the most
interesting, nor does it admit of that weight and closeness of reasoning
which he displayed on other occasions. But there is no single speech
which can convey a satisfactory idea of his powers of mind: to do him
justice, it would be necessary to quote all his works; the only specimen
of Burke is, _all that he wrote_. With respect to most other speakers, a
specimen is generally enough, or more than enough. When you are
acquainted with their manner, and see what proficiency they have made in
the mechanical exercise of their profession, with what facility they can
borrow a simile, or round a period, how dexterously they can argue, and
object, and rejoin, you are satisfied; there is no other difference in
their speeches than what arises from the difference of the subjects. But
this was not the case with Burke. He brought his subjects along with
him; he drew his materials from himself. The only limits which
circumscribed his variety were the stores of his own mind. His stock of
ideas did not consist of a few meagre facts, meagrely stated, of half a
dozen common-places tortured in a thousand different ways: but his mine
of wealth was a profound understanding, inexhaustible as the human
heart, and various as the sources of nature. He therefore enriched every
subject to which he applied himself, and new subjects were only the
occasions of calling forth fresh powers of mind which had not been
before exerted. It would therefore be in vain to look for the proof of
his powers in any one of his speeches or writings: they all contain some
additional proof of power. In speaking of Burke, then, I shall speak of
the whole compass and circuit of his mind—not of that small part or
section of him which I have been able to give: to do otherwise would be
like the story of the man who put the brick in his pocket, thinking to
shew it as the model of a house. I have been able to manage pretty well
with respect to all my other speakers, and curtailed them down without
remorse. It was easy to reduce them within certain limits, to fix their
spirit, and condense their variety; by having a certain quantity given,
you might infer all the rest; it was only the same thing over again. But
who can bind Proteus, or confine the roving flight of genius?
Burke’s writings are better than his speeches, and indeed his speeches
are writings. But he seemed to feel himself more at ease, to have a
fuller possession of his faculties in addressing the public, than in
addressing the House of Commons. Burke was _raised_ into public life:
and he seems to have been prouder of this new dignity than became so
great a man. For this reason, most of his speeches have a sort of
parliamentary preamble to them: there is an air of affected modesty, and
ostentatious trifling in them: he seems fond of coqueting with the House
of Commons, and is perpetually calling the Speaker out to dance a minuet
with him, before he begins. There is also something like an attempt to
stimulate the superficial dulness of his hearers by exciting their
surprise, by running into extravagance: and he sometimes demeans himself
by condescending to what may be considered as bordering too much upon
buffoonery, for the amusement of the company. Those lines of Milton were
admirably applied to him by some one—‘The elephant to make them sport
wreathed his proboscis lithe.’ The truth is, that he was out of his
place in the House of Commons; he was eminently qualified to shine as a
man of genius, as the instructor of mankind, as the brightest luminary
of his age: but he had nothing in common with that motley crew of
knights, citizens, and burgesses. He could not be said to be ‘native and
endued unto that element.’ He was above it; and never appeared like
himself, but when, forgetful of the idle clamours of party, and of the
little views of little men, he appealed to his country, and the
enlightened judgment of mankind.
I am not going to make an idle panegyric on Burke (he has no need of
it); but I cannot help looking upon him as the chief boast and ornament
of the English House of Commons. What has been said of him is, I think,
strictly true, that ‘he was the most eloquent man of his time: his
wisdom was greater than his eloquence.’ The only public man that in my
opinion can be put in any competition with him, is Lord Chatham: and he
moved in a sphere so very remote, that it is almost impossible to
compare them. But though it would perhaps be difficult to determine
which of them excelled most in his particular way, there is nothing in
the world more easy than to point out in what their peculiar excellences
consisted. They were in every respect the reverse of each other.
Chatham’s eloquence was popular: his wisdom was altogether plain and
practical. Burke’s eloquence was that of the poet; of the man of high
and unbounded fancy: his wisdom was profound and contemplative.
Chatham’s eloquence was calculated to make men _act_; Burke’s was
calculated to make them _think_. Chatham could have roused the fury of a
multitude, and wielded their physical energy as he pleased: Burke’s
eloquence carried conviction into the mind of the retired and lonely
student, opened the recesses of the human breast, and lighted up the
face of nature around him. Chatham supplied his hearers with motives to
immediate action: Burke furnished them with _reasons_ for action which
might have little effect upon them at the time, but for which they would
be the wiser and better all their lives after. In research, in
originality, in variety of knowledge, in richness of invention, in depth
and comprehension of mind, Burke had as much the advantage of Lord
Chatham as he was excelled by him in plain common sense, in strong
feeling, in steadiness of purpose, in vehemence, in warmth, in
enthusiasm, and energy of mind. Burke was the man of genius, of fine
sense, and subtle reasoning; Chatham was a man of clear understanding,
of strong sense, and violent passions. Burke’s mind was satisfied with
speculation: Chatham’s was essentially _active_: it could not rest
without an object. The power which governed Burke’s mind was his
Imagination; that which gave its _impetus_ to Chatham’s was Will. The
one was almost the creature of pure intellect, the other of physical
temperament.
There are two very different ends which a man of genius may propose to
himself either in writing or speaking, and which will accordingly give
birth to very different styles. He can have but one of these two
objects; either to enrich or strengthen the mind; either to furnish us
with new ideas, to lead the mind into new trains of thought, to which it
was before unused, and which it was incapable of striking out for
itself; or else to collect and embody what we already knew, to rivet our
old impressions more deeply; to make what was before plain still
plainer, and to give to that which was familiar all the effect of
novelty. In the one case we receive an accession to the stock of our
ideas; in the other, an additional degree of life and energy is infused
into them: our thoughts continue to flow in the same channels, but their
pulse is quickened and invigorated. I do not know how to distinguish
these different styles better than by calling them severally the
inventive and refined, or the impressive and vigorous styles. It is only
the subject-matter of eloquence, however, which is allowed to be remote
or obscure. The things in themselves may be subtle and recondite, but
they must be dragged out of their obscurity and brought struggling to
the light; they must be rendered plain and palpable, (as far as it is in
the wit of man to do so) or they are no longer eloquence. That which by
its natural impenetrability, and in spite of every effort, remains dark
and difficult, which is impervious to every ray, on which the
imagination can shed no lustre, which can be clothed with no beauty, is
not a subject for the orator or poet. At the same time it cannot be
expected that abstract truths or profound observations should ever be
placed in the same strong and dazzling points of view as natural objects
and mere matters of fact. It is enough if they receive a reflex and
borrowed lustre, like that which cheers the first dawn of morning, where
the effect of surprise and novelty gilds every object, and the joy of
beholding another world gradually emerging out of the gloom of night, ‘a
new creation rescued from his reign,’ fills the mind with a sober
rapture. Philosophical eloquence is in writing what _chiaro scuro_ is in
painting; he would be a fool who should object that the colours in the
shaded part of a picture were not so bright as those on the opposite
side; the eye of the connoisseur receives an equal delight from both,
balancing the want of brilliancy and effect with the greater delicacy of
the tints, and difficulty of the execution. In judging of Burke,
therefore, we are to consider first the style of eloquence which he
adopted, and secondly the effects which he produced with it. If he did
not produce the same effects on vulgar minds, as some others have done,
it was not for want of power, but from the turn and direction of his
mind.[55] It was because his subjects, his ideas, his arguments, were
less vulgar. The question is not whether he brought certain truths
equally home to us, but how much nearer he brought them than they were
before. In my opinion, he united the two extremes of refinement and
strength in a higher degree than any other writer whatever.
The subtlety of his mind was undoubtedly that which rendered Burke a
less popular writer and speaker than he otherwise would have been. It
weakened the impression of his observations upon others, but I cannot
admit that it weakened the observations themselves; that it took any
thing from their real weight and solidity. Coarse minds think all that
is subtle, futile: that because it is not gross and obvious and palpable
to the senses, it is therefore light and frivolous, and of no importance
in the real affairs of life; thus making their own confined
understandings the measure of truth, and supposing that whatever they do
not distinctly perceive, is nothing. Seneca, who was not one of the
vulgar, also says, that subtle truths are those which have the least
substance in them, and consequently approach nearest to non-entity. But
for my own part I cannot help thinking that the most important truths
must be the most refined and subtle; for that very reason, that they
must comprehend a great number of particulars, and instead of referring
to any distinct or positive fact, must point out the combined effects of
an extensive chain of causes, operating gradually, remotely, and
collectively, and therefore imperceptibly. General principles are not
the less true or important because from their nature they elude
immediate observation; they are like the air, which is not the less
necessary because we neither see nor feel it, or like that secret
influence which binds the world together, and holds the planets in their
orbits. The very same persons who are the most forward to laugh at all
systematic reasoning as idle and impertinent, you will the next moment
hear exclaiming bitterly against the baleful effects of new-fangled
systems of philosophy, or gravely descanting on the immense importance
of instilling sound principles of morality into the mind. It would not
be a bold conjecture, but an obvious truism to say, that all the great
changes which have been brought about in the moral world, either for the
better or worse, have been introduced not by the bare statement of
facts, which are things already known, and which must always operate
nearly in the same manner, but by the development of certain opinions
and abstract principles of reasoning on life and manners, on the origin
of society and man’s nature in general, which being obscure and
uncertain, vary from time to time, and produce correspondent changes in
the human mind. They are the wholesome dew and rain, or the mildew and
pestilence that silently destroy. To this principle of generalization
all religious creeds, the institutions of wise law-givers, and the
systems of philosophers, owe their influence.
It has always been with me a test of the sense and candour of any one
belonging to the opposite party, whether he allowed Burke to be a great
man. Of all the persons of this description that I have ever known, I
never met with above one or two who would make this concession; whether
it was that party feelings ran too high to admit of any real candour, or
whether it was owing to an essential vulgarity in their habits of
thinking, they all seemed to be of opinion that he was a wild
enthusiast, or a hollow sophist, who was to be answered by bits of
facts, by smart logic, by shrewd questions, and idle songs. They looked
upon him as a man of disordered intellects, because he reasoned in a
style to which they had not been used and which confounded their dim
perceptions. If you said that though you differed with him in sentiment,
yet you thought him an admirable reasoner, and a close observer of human
nature, you were answered with a loud laugh, and some hackneyed
quotation. ‘Alas! Leviathan was not so tamed!’ They did not know whom
they had to contend with. The corner stone, which the builders rejected,
became the head-corner, though to the Jews a stumbling block, and to the
Greeks foolishness; for indeed I cannot discover that he was much better
understood by those of his own party, if we may judge from the little
affinity there is between his mode of reasoning and theirs.—The simple
clue to all his reasonings on politics is, I think, as follows. He did
not agree with some writers, that that mode of government is necessarily
the best which is the cheapest. He saw in the construction of society
other principles at work, and other capacities of fulfilling the
desires, and perfecting the nature of man, besides those of securing the
equal enjoyment of the means of animal life, and doing this at as little
expense as possible. He thought that the wants and happiness of men were
not to be provided for, as we provide for those of a herd of cattle,
merely by attending to their physical necessities. He thought more nobly
of his fellows. He knew that man had affections and passions and powers
of imagination, as well as hunger and thirst and the sense of heat and
cold. He took his idea of political society from the pattern of private
life, wishing, as he himself expresses it, to incorporate the domestic
charities with the orders of the state, and to blend them together. He
strove to establish an analogy between the compact that binds together
the community at large, and that which binds together the several
families that compose it. He knew that the rules that form the basis of
private morality are not founded in reason, that is, in the abstract
properties of those things which are the subjects of them, but in the
nature of man, and his capacity of being affected by certain things from
habit, from imagination, and sentiment, as well as from reason.
Thus, the reason why a man ought to be attached to his wife and children
is not, surely, that they are better than others, (for in this case
every one else ought to be of the same opinion) but because he must be
chiefly interested in those things which are nearest to him, and with
which he is best acquainted, since his understanding cannot reach
equally to every thing; because he must be most attached to those
objects which he has known the longest, and which by their situation
have actually affected him the most, not those which in themselves are
the most affecting, whether they have ever made any impression on him or
no; that is, because he is by his nature the creature of habit and
feeling, and because it is reasonable that he should act in conformity
to his nature. Burke was so far right in saying that it is no objection
to an institution, that it is founded in _prejudice_, but the contrary,
if that prejudice is natural and right; that is, if it arises from those
circumstances which are properly subjects of feeling and association,
not from any defect or perversion of the understanding in those things
which fall strictly under its jurisdiction. On this profound maxim he
took his stand. Thus he contended, that the prejudice in favour of
nobility was natural and proper, and fit to be encouraged by the
positive institutions of society; not on account of the real or personal
merit of the individuals, but because such an institution has a tendency
to enlarge and raise the mind, to keep alive the memory of past
greatness, to connect the different ages of the world together, to carry
back the imagination over a long tract of time, and feed it with the
contemplation of remote events: because it is natural to think highly of
that which inspires us with high thoughts, which has been connected for
many generations with splendour, and affluence, and dignity, and power,
and privilege. He also conceived, that by transferring the respect from
the person to the thing, and thus rendering it steady and permanent, the
mind would be habitually formed to sentiments of deference, attachment,
and fealty, to whatever else demanded its respect: that it would be led
to fix its view on what was elevated and lofty, and be weaned from that
low and narrow jealousy which never willingly or heartily admits of any
superiority in others, and is glad of every opportunity to bring down
all excellence to a level with its own miserable standard. Nobility did
not therefore exist to the prejudice of the other orders of the state,
but by, and for them. The inequality of the different orders of society
did not destroy the unity and harmony of the whole. The health and
well-being of the moral world was to be promoted by the same means as
the beauty of the natural world; by contrast, by change, by light and
shade, by variety of parts, by order and proportion. To think of
reducing all mankind to the same insipid level, seemed to him the same
absurdity as to destroy the inequalities of surface in a country, for
the benefit of agriculture and commerce. In short, he believed that the
interests of men in society should be consulted, and their several
stations and employments assigned, with a view to their nature, not as
physical, but as moral beings, so as to nourish their hopes, to lift
their imagination, to enliven their fancy, to rouse their activity, to
strengthen their virtue, and to furnish the greatest number of objects
of pursuit and means of enjoyment to beings constituted as man is,
consistently with the order and stability of the whole.
The same reasoning might be extended farther. I do not say that his
arguments are conclusive; but they are profound and _true_, as far as
they go. There may be disadvantages and abuses necessarily interwoven
with his scheme, or opposite advantages of infinitely greater value, to
be derived from another order of things and state of society. This
however does not invalidate either the truth or importance of Burke’s
reasoning; since the advantages he points out as connected with the
mixed form of government are really and necessarily inherent in it:
since they are compatible in the same degree with no other; since the
principle itself on which he rests his argument (whatever we may think
of the application) is of the utmost weight and moment; and since on
whichever side the truth lies, it is impossible to make a fair decision
without having the opposite side of the question clearly and fully
stated to us. This Burke has done in a masterly manner. He presents to
you one view or face of society. Let him, who thinks he can, give the
reverse side with equal force, beauty, and clearness. It is said, I
know, that truth is _one_; but to this I cannot subscribe, for it
appears to me that truth is _many_. There are as many truths as there
are things and causes of action and contradictory principles at work in
society. In making up the account of good and evil, indeed, the final
result must be one way or the other; but the particulars on which that
result depends are infinite and various.
It will be seen from what I have said, that I am very far from agreeing
with those who think that Burke was a man without understanding, and a
merely florid writer. There are two causes which have given rise to this
calumny; namely, that narrowness of mind which leads men to suppose that
the truth lies entirely on the side of their own opinions, and that
whatever does not make for them is absurd and irrational; secondly, a
trick we have of confounding reason with judgment, and supposing that it
is merely the province of the understanding to pronounce sentence, and
not to give in evidence, or argue the case; in short, that it is a
passive, not an active faculty. Thus there are persons who never run
into any extravagance, because they are so buttressed up with the
opinions of others on all sides, that they cannot lean much to one side
or the other; they are so little moved with any kind of reasoning, that
they remain at an equal distance from every extreme, and are never very
far from the truth, because the slowness of their faculties will not
suffer them to make much progress in error. These are persons of great
judgment. The scales of the mind are pretty sure to remain even, when
there is nothing in them. In this sense of the word, Burke must be
allowed to have wanted judgment, by all those who think that he was
wrong in his conclusions. The accusation of want of judgment, in fact,
only means that you yourself are of a different opinion. But if in
arriving at one error he discovered a hundred truths, I should consider
myself a hundred times more indebted to him than if, stumbling on that
which I consider as the right side of the question, he had committed a
hundred absurdities in striving to establish his point. I speak of him
now merely as an author, or as far as I and other readers are concerned
with him; at the same time, I should not differ from any one who may be
disposed to contend that the consequences of his writings as instruments
of political power have been tremendous, fatal, such as no exertion of
wit or knowledge or genius can ever counteract or atone for.
Burke also gave a hold to his antagonists by mixing up sentiments and
imagery with his reasoning; so that being unused to such a sight in the
region of politics, they were deceived, and could not discern the fruit
from the flowers. Gravity is the cloke of wisdom; and those who have
nothing else think it an insult to affect the one without the other,
because it destroys the only foundation on which their pretensions are
built. The easiest part of reason is dulness; the generality of the
world are therefore concerned in discouraging any example of unnecessary
brilliancy that might tend to shew that the two things do not always go
together. Burke in some measure dissolved the spell. It was discovered,
that his gold was not the less valuable for being wrought into elegant
shapes, and richly embossed with curious figures; that the solidity of a
building is not destroyed by adding to it beauty and ornament; and that
the strength of a man’s understanding is not always to be estimated in
exact proportion to his want of imagination. His understanding was not
the less real, because it was not the only faculty he possessed. He
justified the description of the poet,—
‘How charming is divine philosophy!
Not harsh and crabbed as dull fools suppose,
But musical as is Apollo’s lute!’
Those who object to this union of grace and beauty with reason, are in
fact weak-sighted people, who cannot distinguish the noble and majestic
form of Truth from that of her sister Folly, if they are dressed both
alike! But there is always a difference even in the adventitious
ornaments they wear, which is sufficient to distinguish them.
Burke was so far from being a gaudy or flowery writer, that he was one
of the severest writers we have. His words are the most like things; his
style is the most strictly suited to the subject. He unites every
extreme and every variety of composition; the lowest and the meanest
words and descriptions with the highest. He exults in the display of
power, in shewing the extent, the force, and intensity of his ideas; he
is led on by the mere impulse and vehemence of his fancy, not by the
affectation of dazzling his readers by gaudy conceits or pompous images.
He was completely carried away by his subject. He had no other object
but to produce the strongest impression on his reader, by giving the
truest, the most characteristic, the fullest, and most forcible
descriptions of things, trusting to the power of his own mind to mould
them into grace and beauty. He did not produce a splendid effect by
setting fire to the light vapours that float in the regions of fancy, as
the chemists make fine colours with phosphorus, but by the eagerness of
his blows struck fire from the flint, and melted the hardest substances
in the furnace of his imagination. The wheels of his imagination did not
catch fire from the rottenness of the materials, but from the rapidity
of their motion. One would suppose, to hear people talk of Burke, that
his style was such as would have suited the ‘Lady’s Magazine’; soft,
smooth, showy, tender, insipid, full of fine words, without any meaning.
The essence of the gaudy or glittering style consists in producing a
momentary effect by fine words and images brought together, without
order or connexion. Burke most frequently produced an effect by the
remoteness and novelty of his combinations, by the force of contrast, by
the striking manner in which the most opposite and unpromising materials
were harmoniously blended together; not by laying his hands on all the
fine things he could think of, but by bringing together those things
which he knew would blaze out into glorious light by their collision.
The florid style is a mixture of affectation and common-place. Burke’s
was an union of untameable vigour and originality.
Burke was not a verbose writer. If he sometimes multiplies words, it is
not for want of ideas, but because there are no words that fully express
his ideas, and he tries to do it as well as he can by different ones. He
had nothing of the _set_ or formal style, the measured cadence, and
stately phraseology of Johnson, and most of our modern writers. This
style, which is what we understand by the _artificial_, is all in one
key. It selects a certain set of words to represent all ideas whatever,
as the most dignified and elegant, and excludes all others as low and
vulgar. The words are not fitted to the things, but the things to the
words. Every thing is seen through a false medium. It is putting a mask
on the face of nature, which may indeed hide some specks and blemishes,
but takes away all beauty, delicacy, and variety. It destroys all
dignity or elevation, because nothing can be raised where all is on a
level, and completely destroys all force, expression, truth, and
character, by arbitrarily confounding the differences of things, and
reducing every thing to the same insipid standard. To suppose that this
stiff uniformity can add any thing to real grace or dignity, is like
supposing that the human body in order to be perfectly graceful, should
never deviate from its upright posture. Another mischief of this method
is, that it confounds all ranks in literature. Where there is no room
for variety, no discrimination, no nicety to be shewn in matching the
idea with its proper word, there can be no room for taste or elegance. A
man must easily learn the art of writing, when every sentence is to be
cast in the same mould: where he is only allowed the use of one word, he
cannot choose wrong, nor will he be in much danger of making himself
ridiculous by affectation or false glitter, when, whatever subject he
treats of, he must treat of it in the same way. This indeed is to wear
golden chains for the sake of ornament.
Burke was altogether free from the pedantry which I have here
endeavoured to expose. His style was as original, as expressive, as rich
and varied, as it was possible; his combinations were as exquisite, as
playful, as happy, as unexpected, as bold and daring, as his fancy. If
any thing, he ran into the opposite extreme of too great an inequality,
if truth and nature could ever be carried to an extreme.
Those who are best acquainted with the writings and speeches of Burke
will not think the praise I have here bestowed on them exaggerated. Some
proof will be found of this in the following extracts. But the full
proof must be sought in his works at large, and particularly in the
‘Thoughts on the Discontents’; in his ‘Reflections on the French
Revolution’; in his ‘Letter to the Duke of Bedford’; and in the
‘Regicide Peace.’ The two last of these are perhaps the most remarkable
of all his writings, from the contrast they afford to each other. The
one is the most delightful exhibition of wild and brilliant fancy, that
is to be found in English prose, but it is too much like a beautiful
picture painted upon gauze; it wants something to support it: the other
is without ornament, but it has all the solidity, the weight, the
gravity of a judicial record. It seems to have been written with a
certain constraint upon himself, and to shew those who said he could not
_reason_, that his arguments might be stripped of their ornaments
without losing any thing of their force. It is certainly, of all his
works, that in which he has shewn most power of logical deduction, and
the only one in which he has made any important use of facts. In general
he certainly paid little attention to them: they were the playthings of
his mind. He saw them as he pleased, not as they were; with the eye of
the philosopher or the poet, regarding them only in their general
principle, or as they might serve to decorate his subject. This is the
natural consequence of much imagination: things that are probable are
elevated into the rank of realities. To those who can reason on the
essences of things, or who can invent according to nature, the
experimental proof is of little value. This was the case with Burke. In
the present instance, however, he seems to have forced his mind into the
service of facts: and he succeeded completely. His comparison between
our connexion with France or Algiers, and his account of the conduct of
the war, are as clear, as convincing, as forcible examples of this kind
of reasoning, as are any where to be met with. Indeed I do not think
there is any thing in Fox (whose mind was purely historical) or in
Chatham, (who attended to feelings more than facts) that will bear a
comparison with them.
Burke has been compared to Cicero—I do not know for what reason. Their
excellences are as different, and indeed as opposite, as they well can
be. Burke had not the polished elegance; the glossy neatness, the artful
regularity, the exquisite modulation of Cicero: he had a thousand times
more richness and originality of mind, more strength and pomp of
diction.
It has been well observed, that the ancients had no word that properly
expresses what we mean by the word _genius_. They perhaps had not the
thing. Their minds appear to have been too exact, too retentive, too
minute and subtle, too sensible to the external differences of things,
too passive under their impressions, to admit of those bold and rapid
combinations, those lofty flights of fancy, which, glancing from heaven
to earth, unite the most opposite extremes, and draw the happiest
illustrations from things the most remote. Their ideas were kept too
confined and distinct by the material form or vehicle in which they were
conveyed, to unite cordially together, or be melted down in the
imagination. Their metaphors are taken from things of the same class,
not from things of different classes; the general analogy not the
individual feeling, directs them in their choice. Hence, as Dr. Johnson
observed, their similes are either repetitions of the same idea, or so
obvious and general as not to lend any additional force to it; as when a
huntress is compared to Diana, or a warrior rushing into battle to a
lion rushing on his prey. Their _forte_ was exquisite art and perfect
imitation. Witness their statues and other things of the same kind. But
they had not that high and enthusiastic fancy which some of our own
writers have shewn. For the proof of this, let any one compare Milton
and Shakspeare with Homer and Sophocles, or Burke with Cicero.
It may be asked whether Burke was a poet. He was so only in the general
vividness of his fancy, and in richness of invention. There may be
poetical passages in his works, but I certainly think that his writings
in general are quite distinct from poetry; and that for the reason
before given, namely, that the subject-matter of them is not poetical.
The finest parts of them are illustrations or personifications of dry
abstract ideas;[56] and the union between the idea and the illustration
is not of that perfect and pleasing kind as to constitute poetry, or
indeed to be admissible, but for the effect intended to be produced by
it; that is, by every means in our power to give animation and
attraction to subjects in themselves barren of ornament, but which at
the same time are pregnant with the most important consequences, and in
which the understanding and the passions are equally interested.
I have heard it remarked by a person, to whose opinion I would sooner
submit than to a general council of critics, that the sound of Burke’s
prose is not musical; that it wants cadence; and that instead of being
so lavish of his imagery as is generally supposed, he seemed to him to
be rather parsimonious in the use of it, always expanding and making the
most of his ideas. This may be true if we compare him with some of our
poets, or perhaps with some of our early prose writers, but not if we
compare him with any of our political writers or parliamentary speakers.
There are some very fine things of Lord Bolingbroke’s on the same
subjects, but not equal to Burke’s. As for Junius, he is at the head of
his class; but that class is not the highest. He has been said to have
more dignity than Burke. Yes—if the stalk of a giant is less dignified
than the strut of a _petit-maître_. I do not mean to speak
disrespectfully of Junius, but grandeur is not the character of his
composition; and if it is not to be found in Burke, it is to be found
nowhere.
CHARACTER OF MR. FOX, 1807[57]
I shall begin with observing generally, that Mr. Fox excelled all his
contemporaries in the extent of his knowledge, in the clearness and
distinctness of his views, in quickness of apprehension, in plain,
practical common sense, in the full, strong, and absolute possession of
his subject. A measure was no sooner proposed than he seemed to have an
instantaneous and intuitive perception of its various bearings and
consequences; of the manner in which it would operate on the different
classes of society, on commerce or agriculture, on our domestic or
foreign policy; of the difficulties attending its execution; in a word,
of all its practical results, and the comparative advantages to be
gained either by adopting or rejecting it. He was intimately acquainted
with the interests of the different parts of the community, with the
minute and complicated details of political economy, with our external
relations, with the views, the resources, and the maxims of other
states. He was master of all those facts and circumstances which it was
necessary to know in order to judge fairly and determine wisely; and he
knew them not loosely or lightly, but in number, weight, and measure. He
had also stored his memory by reading and general study, and improved
his understanding by the lamp of history. He was well acquainted with
the opinions and sentiments of the best authors, with the maxims of the
most profound politicians, with the causes of the rise and fall of
states, with the general passions of men, with the characters of
different nations, and the laws and constitution of his own country. He
was a man of a large, capacious, powerful, and highly cultivated
intellect. No man could know more than he knew; no man’s knowledge could
be more sound, more plain and useful; no man’s knowledge could lie in
more connected and tangible masses; no man could be more perfectly
master of his ideas, could reason upon them more closely, or decide upon
them more impartially. His mind was full, even to overflowing. He was so
habitually conversant with the most intricate and comprehensive trains
of thought, or such was the natural vigour and exuberance of his mind,
that he seemed to recal them without any effort. His ideas quarrelled
for utterance. So far from ever being at a loss for them, he was obliged
rather to repress and rein them in, lest they should overwhelm and
confound, instead of informing the understandings of his hearers.
If to this we add the ardour and natural impetuosity of his mind, his
quick sensibility, his eagerness in the defence of truth, and his
impatience of every thing that looked like trick or artifice or
affectation, we shall be able in some measure to account for the
character of his eloquence. His thoughts came crowding in too fast for
the slow and mechanical process of speech. What he saw in an instant, he
could only express imperfectly, word by word, and sentence after
sentence. He would, if he could, ‘have bared his swelling heart,’ and
laid open at once the rich treasures of knowledge with which his bosom
was fraught. It is no wonder that this difference between the rapidity
of his feelings, and the formal round-about method of communicating
them, should produce some disorder in his frame; that the throng of his
ideas should try to overleap the narrow boundaries which confined them,
and tumultuously break down their prison-doors, instead of waiting to be
let out one by one, and following patiently at due intervals and with
mock dignity, like poor dependents, in the train of words:—that he
should express himself in hurried sentences, in involuntary
exclamations, by vehement gestures, by sudden starts and bursts of
passion. Every thing shewed the agitation of his mind. His tongue
faltered, his voice became almost suffocated, and his face was bathed in
tears. He was lost in the magnitude of his subject. He reeled and
staggered under the load of feeling which oppressed him. He rolled like
the sea beaten by a tempest.[58] Whoever, having the feelings of a man,
compared him at these times with his boasted rival,—his stiff, straight,
upright figure, his gradual contortions, turning round as if moved by a
pivot, his solemn pauses, his deep tones, ‘whose sound reverbed their
own hollowness,’ must have said, This is a man; that is an automaton. If
Fox had needed grace, he would have had it; but it was not the character
of his mind, nor would it have suited with the style of his eloquence.
It was Pitt’s object to smooth over the abruptness and intricacies of
his argument by the gracefulness of his manner, and to fix the attention
of his hearers on the pomp and sound of his words. Lord Chatham, again,
strove to _command_ others; he did not try to convince them, but to
overpower their understandings by the greater strength and vehemence of
his own; to awe them by a sense of personal superiority: and he
therefore was obliged to assume a lofty and dignified manner. It was to
him they bowed, not to truth; and whatever related to _himself_, must
therefore have a tendency to inspire respect and admiration. Indeed, he
would never have attempted to gain that ascendant over men’s minds that
he did, if either his mind or body had been different from what they
were; if his temper had not urged him to control and command others, or
if his personal advantages had not enabled him to secure that kind of
authority which he coveted. But it would have been ridiculous in Fox to
have affected either the smooth plausibility, the stately gravity of the
one, or the proud, domineering, imposing dignity of the other; or even
if he could have succeeded, it would only have injured the effect of his
speeches.[59] What he had to rely on was the strength, the solidity of
his ideas, his complete and thorough knowledge of his subject. It was
his business therefore to fix the attention of his hearers, not on
himself, but on his subject; to rivet it there, to hurry it on from
words to things:—the only circumstance of which they required to be
convinced with respect to himself, was the sincerity of his opinions;
and this would be best done by the earnestness of his manner, by giving
a loose to his feelings, and by shewing the most perfect forgetfulness
of himself, and of what others thought of him. The moment a man shews
you either by affected words or looks or gestures, that he is thinking
of himself, and you, that he is trying either to please or terrify you
into compliance, there is an end at once to that kind of eloquence which
owes its effect to the force of truth, and to your confidence in the
sincerity of the speaker. It was, however, to the confidence inspired by
the earnestness and simplicity of his manner, that Mr. Fox was indebted
for more than half the effect of his speeches. Some others (as Lord
Lansdown for instance) might possess nearly as much information, as
exact a knowledge of the situation and interests of the country; but
they wanted that zeal, that animation, that enthusiasm, that deep sense
of the importance of the subject, which removes all doubt or suspicion
from the minds of the hearers and communicates its own warmth to every
breast. We may convince by argument alone; but it is by the interest we
discover in the success of our reasonings, that we persuade others to
feel and act with us. There are two circumstances which Fox’s speeches
and Lord Chatham’s had in common: they are alike distinguished by a kind
of plain downright common sense, and by the vehemence of their manner.
But still there is a great difference between them, in both these
respects. Fox in his opinions was governed by facts—Chatham was more
influenced by the feelings of others respecting those facts. Fox
endeavoured to find out what the consequences of any measure would be;
Chatham attended more to what people would think of it. Fox appealed to
the practical reason of mankind; Chatham to popular prejudice. The one
repelled the encroachments of power by supplying his hearers with
arguments against it; the other by rousing their passions and arming
their resentment against those who would rob them of their birthright.
Their vehemence and impetuosity arose also from very different feelings.
In Chatham it was pride, passion, self-will, impatience of control, a
determination to have his own way, to carry every thing before him[60];
in Fox it was pure good nature, a sincere love of truth, an ardent
attachment to what he conceived to be right; an anxious concern for the
welfare and liberties of mankind. Or if we suppose that ambition had
taken a strong hold of both their minds, yet their ambition was of a
very different kind: in the one it was the love of power, in the other
it was the love of fame. Nothing can be more opposite than these two
principles, both in their origin and tendency. The one originates in a
selfish, haughty, domineering spirit; the other in a social and generous
sensibility, desirous of the love and esteem of others, and anxiously
bent upon gaining merited applause. The one grasps at immediate power by
any means within its reach; the other, if it does not square its actions
by the rules of virtue, at least refers them to a standard which comes
the nearest to it—the disinterested applause of our country, and the
enlightened judgment of posterity. The love of fame is consistent with
the steadiest attachment to principle, and indeed strengthens and
supports it; whereas the love of power, where this is the ruling
passion, requires the sacrifice of principle at every turn, and is
inconsistent even with the shadow of it. I do not mean to say that Fox
had no love of power, or Chatham no love of fame, (this would be
reversing all we know of human nature,) but that the one principle
predominated in the one, and the other in the other. My reader will do
me great injustice if he supposes that in attempting to describe the
characters of different speakers by contrasting their general qualities,
I mean any thing beyond the _more_ or _less_: but it is necessary to
describe those qualities simply and in the abstract, in order to make
the distinction intelligible. Chatham resented any attack made upon the
cause of liberty, of which he was the avowed champion, as an indignity
offered to himself. Fox felt it as a stain upon the honour of his
country, and as an injury to the rights of his fellow citizens. The one
was swayed by his own passions and purposes, with very little regard to
the consequences; the sensibility of the other was roused, and his
passions kindled into a generous flame, by a real interest in whatever
related to the welfare of mankind, and by an intense and earnest
contemplation of the consequences of the measures he opposed. It was
this union of the zeal of the patriot with the enlightened knowledge of
the statesman, that gave to the eloquence of Fox its more than mortal
energy; that warmed, expanded, penetrated every bosom. He relied on the
force of truth and nature alone; the refinements of philosophy, the pomp
and pageantry of the imagination were forgotten, or seemed light and
frivolous; the fate of nations, the welfare of millions, hung suspended
as he spoke; a torrent of manly eloquence poured from his heart, bore
down every thing in its course, and surprised into a momentary sense of
human feeling the breathing corpses, the wire-moved puppets, the stuffed
figures, the flexible machinery, the ‘deaf and dumb things’ of a court.
I find (I do not know how the reader feels) that it is difficult to
write a character of Fox without running into insipidity or
extravagance. And the reason of this is, there are no splendid
contrasts, no striking irregularities, no curious distinctions to work
upon; no ‘jutting frieze, buttress, nor coigne of ‘vantage,’ for the
imagination to take hold of. It was a plain marble slab, inscribed in
plain legible characters, without either hieroglyphics or carving. There
was the same directness and manly simplicity in every thing that he did.
The whole of his character may indeed be summed up in two words—strength
and simplicity. Fox was in the class of common men, but he was the first
in that class. Though it is easy to describe the difference of things,
nothing is more difficult than to describe their degrees or quantities.
In what I am going to say, I hope I shall not be suspected of a design
to underrate his powers of mind, when in fact I am only trying to
ascertain their nature and direction. The degree and extent to which he
possessed them can only be known by reading, or indeed by having heard
his speeches.
His mind, as I have already said, was, I conceive, purely _historical_:
and having said this, I have I believe said all. But perhaps it will be
necessary to explain a little farther what I mean. I mean, then, that
his memory was in an extraordinary degree tenacious of facts; that they
were crowded together in his mind without the least perplexity or
confusion; that there was no chain of consequences too vast for his
powers of comprehension; that the different parts and ramifications of
his subject were never so involved and intricate but that they were
easily disentangled in the clear prism of his understanding. The basis
of his wisdom was experience: however, he not only knew what had
happened; but by an exact knowledge of the real state of things, he
could always tell what in the common course of events would happen in
future. The force of his mind was exerted upon facts: as long as he
could lean directly upon these, as long as he had the actual objects to
refer to, to steady himself by, he could analyse, he could combine, he
could compare and reason upon them, with the utmost exactness; but he
could not reason _out of_ them. He was what is understood by a
_matter-of-fact_ reasoner. He was better acquainted with the concrete
masses of things, their substantial forms, and practical connexions,
than with their abstract nature or general definitions. He was a man of
extensive information, of sound knowledge, and clear understanding,
rather than the acute observer or profound thinker. He was the man of
business, the accomplished statesman, rather than the philosopher. His
reasonings were, generally speaking, calculations of certain positive
results, which, the _data_ being given, must follow as matters of
course, rather than unexpected and remote truths drawn from a deep
insight into human nature, and the subtle application of general
principles to particular cases. They consisted chiefly in the detail and
combination of a vast number of items in an account, worked by the known
rules of political arithmetic; not in the discovery of bold,
comprehensive, and original theorems in the science. They were rather
acts of memory, of continued attention, of a power of bringing all his
ideas to bear at once upon a single point, than of reason or invention.
He was the attentive observer who watches the various effects and
successive movements of a machine already constructed, and can tell how
to manage it while it goes on as it has always done; but who knows
little or nothing of the principles on which it is constructed, nor how
to set it right, if it becomes disordered, except by the most common and
obvious expedients. Burke was to Fox what the geometrician is to the
mechanic. Much has been said of the ‘prophetic mind’ of Mr. Fox. The
same epithet has been applied to Mr. Burke, till it has become
proverbial. It has, I think, been applied without much reason to either.
Fox wanted the scientific part, Burke wanted the practical. Fox had too
little imagination, Burke had too much: that is, he was careless of
facts, and was led away by his passions to look at one side of a
question only. He had not that fine sensibility to outward impressions,
that nice _tact_ of circumstances, which is necessary to the consummate
politician. Indeed, his wisdom was more that of the legislator than of
the active statesman. They both tried their strength in the Ulysses’ bow
of politicians, the French Revolution: and they were both foiled. Fox
indeed foretold the success of the French in combating with foreign
powers. But this was no more than what every friend of the liberty of
France foresaw or foretold as well as he. All those on the same side of
the question were inspired with the same sagacity on the subject. Burke,
on the other hand, seems to have been before-hand with the public in
foreboding the internal disorders that would attend the Revolution, and
its ultimate failure; but then it is at least a question whether he did
not make good his own predictions: and certainly he saw into the causes
and connexion of events much more clearly after they had happened than
before. He was however undoubtedly a profound commentator on that
apocalyptical chapter in the history of human nature, which I do not
think Fox was. Whether led to it by the events or not, he saw thoroughly
into the principles that operated to produce them; and he pointed them
out to others in a manner which could not be mistaken. I can conceive of
Burke, as the genius of the storm, perched over Paris, the centre and
focus of anarchy, (so he would have us believe) hovering ‘with mighty
wings outspread over the abyss, and rendering it pregnant,’ watching the
passions of men gradually unfolding themselves in new situations,
penetrating those hidden motives which hurried them from one extreme
into another, arranging and analysing the principles that alternately
pervaded the vast chaotic mass, and extracting the elements of order and
the cement of social life from the decomposition of all society: while
Charles Fox in the meantime dogged the heels of the Allies, (all the way
calling out to them to stop) with his sutler’s bag, his muster-roll, and
army estimates at his back. He said, You have only fifty thousand
troops, the enemy have a hundred thousand: this place is dismantled, it
can make no resistance: your troops were beaten last year, they must
therefore be disheartened this. This is excellent sense and sound
reasoning, but I do not see what it has to do with philosophy. But why
was it necessary that Fox should be a philosopher? Why, in the first
place, Burke was a philosopher, and Fox, to keep up with him, must be so
too. In the second place, it was necessary, in order that his indiscreet
admirers, who had no idea of greatness but as it consists in certain
names and pompous titles, might be able to talk big about their patron.
It is a bad compliment we pay to our idol when we endeavour to make him
out something different from himself; it shews that we are not satisfied
with what he was. I have heard it said that he had as much imagination
as Burke. To this extravagant assertion I shall make what I conceive to
be a very cautious and moderate answer: that Burke was as superior to
Fox in this respect as Fox perhaps was to the first person you would
meet in the street. There is in fact hardly an instance of imagination
to be met with in any of his speeches; what there is, is of the
rhetorical kind. I may, however, be wrong. He might excel as much in
profound thought, and richness of fancy, as he did in other things;
though I cannot perceive it. However, when any one publishes a book
called the Beauties of Fox, containing the original reflections,
brilliant passages, lofty metaphors, &c. to be found in his speeches,
without the detail or connexion, I shall be very ready to give the point
up.
In logic Fox was inferior to Pitt—indeed, in all the formalities of
eloquence, in which the latter excelled as much as he was deficient in
the soul or substance. When I say that Pitt was superior to Fox in
logic, I mean that he excelled him in the formal division of the
subject, in always keeping it in view, as far as he chose; in being able
to detect any deviation from it in others; in the management of his
general topics; in being aware of the mood and figure in which the
argument must move, with all its nonessentials, dilemmas, and
alternatives; in never committing himself, nor ever suffering his
antagonist to occupy an inch of the plainest ground, but under cover of
a syllogism. He had more of ‘the dazzling fence of argument,’ as it has
been called. He was, in short, better at his weapon. But then,
unfortunately, it was only a dagger of lath that the wind could turn
aside; whereas Fox wore a good trusty blade, of solid metal, and real
execution.
I shall not trouble myself to inquire whether Fox was a man of strict
virtue and principle; or in other words, how far he was one of those who
screw themselves up to a certain pitch of ideal perfection, who, as it
were, set themselves in the stocks of morality, and make mouths at their
own situation. He was not one of that tribe, and shall not be tried by
their self-denying ordinances. But he was endowed with one of the most
excellent natures that ever fell to the lot of any of God’s creatures.
It has been said, that ‘an honest man’s the noblest work of God.’ There
is indeed a purity, a rectitude, an integrity of heart, a freedom from
every selfish bias, and sinister motive, a manly simplicity and noble
disinterestedness of feeling, which is in my opinion to be preferred
before every other gift of nature or art. There is a greatness of soul
that is superior to all the brilliancy of the understanding. This
strength of moral character, which is not only a more valuable but a
rarer quality than strength of understanding (as we are oftener led
astray by the narrowness of our feelings, than want of knowledge) Fox
possessed in the highest degree. He was superior to every kind of
jealousy, of suspicion, of malevolence; to every narrow and sordid
motive. He was perfectly above every species of duplicity, of low art
and cunning. He judged of every thing in the downright sincerity of his
nature, without being able to impose upon himself by any hollow
disguise, or to lend his support to any thing unfair or dishonourable.
He had an innate love of truth, of justice, of probity, of whatever was
generous or liberal. Neither his education, nor his connexions, nor his
situation in life, nor the low intrigues and virulence of party, could
ever alter the simplicity of his taste, nor the candid openness of his
nature. There was an elastic force about his heart, a freshness of
social feeling, a warm glowing humanity, which remained unimpaired to
the last. He was by nature a gentleman. By this I mean that he felt a
certain deference and respect for the person of every man; he had an
unaffected frankness and benignity in his behaviour to others, the
utmost liberality in judging of their conduct and motives. A refined
humanity constitutes the character of a gentleman.[61] He was the true
friend of his country, as far as it is possible for a statesman to be
so. But his love of his country did not consist in his hatred of the
rest of mankind. I shall conclude this account by repeating what Burke
said of him at a time when his testimony was of the most value. ‘To his
great and masterly understanding he joined the utmost possible degree of
moderation: he was of the most artless, candid, open, and benevolent
disposition; disinterested in the extreme; of a temper mild and
placable, even to a fault; and without one drop of gall in his
constitution.’
CHARACTER OF MR. PITT, 1806
The character of Mr. Pitt was, perhaps, one of the most singular that
ever existed. With few talents, and fewer virtues, he acquired and
preserved in one of the most trying situations, and in spite of all
opposition, the highest reputation for the possession of every moral
excellence, and as having carried the attainments of eloquence and
wisdom as far as human abilities could go. This he did (strange as it
appears) by a negation (together with the common virtues) of the common
vices of human nature, and by the complete negation of every other
talent that might interfere with the only one which he possessed in a
supreme degree, and which indeed may be made to include the appearance
of all others—an artful use of words, and a certain dexterity of logical
arrangement. In these alone his power consisted; and the defect of all
other qualities, which usually constitute greatness, contributed to the
more complete success of these. Having no strong feelings, no distinct
perceptions, his mind having no link, as it were, to connect it with the
world of external nature, every subject presented to him nothing more
than a _tabula rasa_, on which he was at liberty to lay whatever
colouring of language he pleased; having no general principles, no
comprehensive views of things, no moral habits of thinking, no system of
action, there was nothing to hinder him from pursuing any particular
purpose, by any means that offered; having never any plan, he could not
be convicted of inconsistency, and his own pride and obstinacy were the
only rules of his conduct. Having no insight into human nature, no
sympathy with the passions of men, or apprehension of their real
designs, he seemed perfectly insensible to the consequences of things,
and would believe nothing till it actually happened. The fog and haze in
which he saw every thing communicated itself to others; and the total
indistinctness and uncertainty of his own ideas tended to confound the
perceptions of his hearers more effectually than the most ingenious
misrepresentation could have done. Indeed, in defending his conduct he
never seemed to consider himself as at all responsible for the success
of his measures, or to suppose that future events were in our own power;
but that as the best-laid schemes might fail, and there was no providing
against all possible contingencies, this was a sufficient excuse for our
plunging at once into any dangerous or absurd enterprize, without the
least regard to consequences. His reserved logic confined itself solely
to the _possible_ and the _impossible_; and he appeared to regard the
_probable_ and _improbable_, the only foundation of moral prudence or
political wisdom, as beneath the notice of a profound statesman; as if
the pride of the human intellect were concerned in never entrusting
itself with subjects, where it may be compelled to acknowledge its
weakness.[62] From his manner of reasoning, he seemed not to have
believed that the truth of his statements depended on the reality of the
facts, but that the things depended on the order in which he arranged
them in words: you would not suppose him to be agitating a serious
question which had real grounds to go upon, but to be declaiming upon an
imaginary thesis, proposed as an exercise in the schools. He never set
himself to examine the force of the objections that were brought against
his measures, or attempted to establish them upon clear, solid grounds
of his own; but constantly contented himself with first gravely stating
the logical form, or dilemma, to which the question reduced itself, and
then, after having declared his opinion, proceeded to amuse his hearers
by a series of rhetorical common places, connected together in grave,
sonorous, and elaborately constructed periods, without ever shewing
their real application to the subject in dispute. Thus, if any member of
the Opposition disapproved of any measure, and enforced his objections
by pointing out the many evils with which it was fraught, or the
difficulties attending its execution, his only answer was ‘that it was
true there might be inconveniences attending the measure proposed, but
we were to remember, that every expedient that could be devised might be
said to be nothing more than a choice of difficulties, and that all that
human prudence could do was to consider on which side the advantages
lay; that for his part, he conceived that the present measure was
attended with more advantages and fewer disadvantages than any other
that could be adopted; that if we were diverted from our object by every
appearance of difficulty, the wheels of government would be clogged by
endless delays and imaginary grievances; that most of the objections
made to the measure appeared to him to be trivial, others of them
unfounded and improbable; or that if a scheme free from all these
objections could be proposed, it might after all prove inefficient;
while, in the mean time, a material object remained unprovided for, or
the opportunity of action was lost.’ This mode of reasoning is admirably
described by Hobbes, in speaking of the writings of some of the
Schoolmen, of whom he says, that ‘they had learned the trick of imposing
what they list upon their readers, and declining the force of true
reason by verbal forks; that is, distinctions which signify nothing, but
serve only to astonish the multitude of ignorant men.’ That what I have
here stated comprehends the whole force of his mind, which consisted
solely in this evasive dexterity and perplexing formality, assisted by a
copiousness of words and common-place topics, will, I think, be evident
to any one who carefully looks over his speeches, undazzled by the
reputation or personal influence of the speaker. It will be in vain to
look in them for any of the common proofs of human genius or wisdom. He
has not left behind him a single memorable saying—not one profound
maxim—one solid observation—one forcible description—one beautiful
thought—one humourous picture—one affecting sentiment.[63] He has made
no addition whatever to the stock of human knowledge. He did not possess
any one of those faculties which contribute to the instruction and
delight of mankind—depth of understanding, imagination, sensibility,
wit, vivacity, clear and solid judgment. But it may be asked, If these
qualities are not to be found in him, where are we to look for them? And
I may be required to point out instances of them. I shall answer then,
that he had none of the profound legislative wisdom, piercing sagacity,
or rich, impetuous, high-wrought imagination of Burke; the manly
eloquence, strong sense, exact knowledge, vehemence and natural
simplicity of Fox; the ease, brilliancy, and acuteness of Sheridan. It
is not merely that he had not all these qualities in the degree that
they were severally possessed by his rivals, but he had not any of them
in any striking degree. His reasoning is a technical arrangement of
unmeaning common-places; his eloquence merely rhetorical; his style
monotonous and artificial. If he could pretend to any one excellence in
an eminent degree, it was to taste in composition. There is certainly
nothing low, nothing puerile, nothing far-fetched or abrupt in his
speeches; there is a kind of faultless regularity pervading them
throughout; but in the confined, mechanical, passive mode of eloquence
which he adopted, it seemed rather more difficult to commit errors than
to avoid them. A man who is determined never to move out of the beaten
road, cannot lose his way. However, habit, joined to the peculiar
mechanical memory which he possessed, carried this correctness to a
degree which, in an extemporaneous speaker, was almost miraculous; he
perhaps hardly ever uttered a sentence that was not perfectly regular
and connected. In this respect, he not only had the advantage over his
own contemporaries, but perhaps no one that ever lived equalled him in
this singular faculty. But for this, he would always have passed for a
common man; and to this the constant sameness, and, if I may so say,
vulgarity of his ideas, must have contributed not a little, as there was
nothing to distract his mind from this one object of his unintermitted
attention; and as even in his choice of words he never aimed at any
thing more than a certain general propriety, and stately uniformity of
style. His talents were exactly fitted for the situation in which he was
placed; where it was his business, not to overcome others, but to avoid
being overcome. He was able to baffle opposition, not from strength or
firmness, but from the evasive ambiguity and impalpable nature of his
resistance, which gave no hold to the rude grasp of his opponents: no
force could bind the loose phantom, and his mind (though ‘not matchless,
and his pride humbled by such rebuke,’) soon rose from defeat unhurt,
‘And in its liquid texture mortal wound
Receiv’d no more than can the fluid air.’[64]
PITT AND BUONAPARTE
_From the Morning Post, March 19, 1800._
‘Plutarch, in his comparative biography of Rome and Greece, has
generally chosen for each pair of Lives the two contemporaries who most
nearly resemble each other. His work would, perhaps, have been more
interesting, if he had adopted the contrary arrangement, and selected
those rather, who had attained to the possession of similar influence,
or similar fame, by means, actions, and talents the most dissimilar. For
power is the sole object of philosophical attention in man, as in
inanimate nature; and in the one equally as in the other, we understand
it more intimately, the more diverse the circumstances are with which we
have observed it to exist. In our days, the two persons who appear to
have influenced the interests and actions of men the most deeply and the
most diffusively, are, beyond doubt, the Chief Consul of France, and the
Prime Minister of Great Britain: and in these two, are presented to us
similar situations, with the greatest dissimilitude of characters.
William Pitt was the younger son of Lord Chatham; a fact of no ordinary
importance in the solution of his character, of no mean significance in
the heraldry of morals and intellect. His father’s rank, fame, political
connexions, and parental ambition, were his mould: he was cast, rather
than grew. A palpable election, a conscious predestination controlled
the free agency, and transfigured the individuality of his mind, and
that, which he might have been, was compelled into that, which he was to
be. From his early childhood it was his father’s custom to make him
stand upon a chair, and declaim before a large company; by which
exercise, practised so frequently, and continued for so many years, he
acquired a premature and unnatural dexterity in the combination of
words, which must of necessity have diverted his attention from present
objects, obscured his impressions, and deadened his genuine feelings.
Not the thing on which he was speaking, but the praises to be gained by
the speech, were present to his intuition; hence he associated all the
operations of his faculties with words, and his pleasures with the
surprise excited by them. But an inconceivably large portion of human
knowledge and human power is involved in the science and management of
words; and an education of words, though it destroys genius, will often
create and always foster, talent. The young Pitt was conspicuous far
beyond his fellows, both at school and at college. He was always
full-grown: he had neither the promise nor the awkwardness of a growing
intellect. Vanity, early satiated, formed, and elevated itself into a
love of power; and in losing this colloquial vanity, he lost one of the
prime links that connect the individual with the species, too early for
the affections, though not too early for the understanding. At College
he was a severe student; his mind was founded and elemented in words and
generalities, and these too formed all the superstructure. That revelry
and that debauchery, which are so often fatal to the powers of
intellect, would probably have been serviceable to him; they would have
given him a closer communion with realities, they would have induced a
greater presentness to present objects. But Mr. Pitt’s conduct was
correct, unimpressibly correct. His after-discipline in the special
pleader’s office, and at the Bar, carried on the scheme of his education
with unbroken uniformity. His first political connexions were with the
Reformers; but those who accuse him of sympathising or coalescing with
their intemperate or visionary plans, misunderstand his character, and
are ignorant of the historical facts. Imaginary situations in an
imaginary state of things, rise up in minds that possess a power and
facility in combining images. Mr. Pitt’s ambition was conversant with
old situations in the old state of things, which furnish nothing to the
imagination, though much to the wishes. In his endeavours to realise his
father’s plan of reform, he was probably as sincere as a being, who had
derived so little knowledge from actual impressions, could be. But his
sincerity had no living root of affection: while it was propped up by
his love of praise and immediate power, so long it stood erect, and no
longer. He became a member of the Parliament, supported the popular
opinions, and in a few years, by the influence of the popular party, was
placed in that high and awful rank in which he now is. The fortunes of
his country, we had almost said the fates of the world, were placed in
his wardship—we sink in prostration before the inscrutable dispensations
of Providence, when we reflect in whose wardship the fates of the world
were placed.
The influencer of his country and of his species was a young man, the
creature of another’s predetermination, sheltered and weather-fended
from all the elements of experience; a young man, whose feet had never
wandered, whose very eye had never turned to the right or to the left,
whose whole track had been as curveless as the motions of a fascinated
reptile! It was a young man, whose heart was solitary, because he had
existed always amid objects of futurity, and whose imagination too was
unpopulous, because those objects of hope, to which his habitual wishes
had transferred, and as it were, projected his existence, were all
familiar and long established objects. A plant sown and reared in a
hot-house, for whom the very air that surrounded him, had been regulated
by the thermometer of previous purpose; to whom the light of nature had
penetrated only through glasses and covers, who had had the sun without
the breeze; whom no storm had shaken; on whom no rain had pattered; on
whom the dews of Heaven had not fallen! A being, who had had no feelings
connected with man or nature; no spontaneous impulses; no unbiassed and
desultory studies; no genuine science; nothing that constitutes
individuality in intellect; nothing that teaches brotherhood in
affection. Such was the man, such, and so denaturalized the spirit, on
whose wisdom and philanthropy the lives and living enjoyments of so many
millions of human beings were made unavoidably dependent. From this time
a real enlargement of mind became almost impossible. Pre-occupations,
intrigue, the undue passion and anxiety, with which all facts must be
surveyed; the crowd and confusion of these facts, none of them seen, but
all communicated, and by that very circumstance, and by the necessity of
perpetually classifying them, transmuted into words and generalities;
pride, flattery, irritation, artificial power; these, and circumstances
resembling these, necessarily render the heights of office barren
heights, which command indeed a vast and extensive prospect, but attract
so many clouds and vapours, that, most often, all prospect is precluded.
Still, however, Mr. Pitt’s situation, however inauspicious for his real
being, was favourable to his fame. He heaped period on period; persuaded
himself and the nation, that extemporaneous arrangement of sentences was
eloquence; and that eloquence implied wisdom. His father’s struggles for
freedom, and his own attempts, gave him an almost unexampled popularity;
and his office necessarily associated with his name all the great
events, that happened during his administration. There were not,
however, wanting men, who saw through the delusion: and refusing to
attribute the industry, integrity, and enterprising spirit of our
merchants, the agricultural improvements of our landholders, the great
inventions of our manufacturers, or the valor and skilfulness of our
sailors, to the merits of a Minister: they have continued to decide on
his character from those acts and those merits which belong to him, and
to him alone. Judging him by this standard, they have been able to
discover in him no one proof or symptom of a commanding genius. They
have discovered him never controlling, never creating, events, but
always yielding to them with rapid change, and sheltering himself from
inconsistency by perpetual indefiniteness. In the Russian War, they saw
him abandoning meanly what he had planned weakly, and threatened
insolently. In the debates on the Regency, they detected the laxity of
his constitutional principles, and received proofs that his eloquence
consisted not in the ready application of a general system to particular
questions, but in the facility of arguing for or against any question by
specious generalities, without reference to any system. In these
debates, he combined what is most dangerous in democracy, with all that
is most degrading in the old superstitions of Monarchy, and taught an
inherency of the office in the person of the King, which made the office
itself a nullity, and the Premiership, with its accompanying majority,
the sole and permanent power of the State. And now came the French
Revolution. This was a new event; the old routine of reasoning, the
common trade of politics, were to become obsolete. He appeared wholly
unprepared for it. Half favouring, half condemning, ignorant of what he
favoured, and why he condemned; he neither displayed the honest
enthusiasm and fixed principle of Mr. Fox, nor the intimate acquaintance
with the general nature of man, and the consequent prescience of Mr.
Burke. After the declaration of war, long did he continue in the common
cant of office, in declamation about the Scheld, and Holland, and all
the vulgar causes of common contests, and when at last the immense
genius of his new supporter had beat him out of these words (words
signifying places and dead objects, and signifying nothing more) he
adopted other words in their places, other generalities—Atheism and
Jacobinism, phrases, which he had learnt from Mr. Burke, but without
learning the philosophical definitions and involved consequences, with
which that great man accompanied those words. Since the death of Mr.
Burke, the forms and the sentiments, and the tone of the French, have
undergone many and important changes: how indeed is it possible, that it
should be otherwise, while man is the creature of experience? But still
Mr. Pitt proceeds in an endless repetition of the same general phrases.
This is his element: deprive him of general and abstract phrases, and
you reduce him to silence. But you cannot deprive him of them. Press him
to specify an individual fact of advantage to be derived from a war, and
he answers, Security. Call upon him to particularise a crime, and he
exclaims, Jacobinism. Abstractions defined by abstractions—generalities
defined by generalities! As a minister of finance, he is still, as ever,
the man of words and abstractions, figures, Custom-house reports,
imports and exports, commerce and revenue—all flourishing, all splendid.
Never was such a prosperous country as England under his administration.
Let it be objected, that the agriculture of the country is, by the
overbalance of commerce, and by various and complex causes, in such a
state, that the country hangs as a pensioner for bread on its
neighbours, and a bad season uniformly threatens us with famine, this
(it is replied) is owing to our prosperity—all prosperous nations are in
great distress for food. Still prosperity, still general phrases,
uninforced by one single image, one single fact of real national
amelioration, of any one comfort enjoyed, where it was not before
enjoyed, of any one class of society becoming healthier, or wiser, or
happier. These are things, these are realities; and these Mr. Pitt has
neither the imagination to body forth, or the sensibility to feel for.
Once, indeed, in an evil hour intriguing for popularity he suffered
himself to be persuaded to evince a talent for the real, the individual;
and he brought in his Poor Bill. When we hear the Minister’s talents for
finance so loudly trumpeted, we turn involuntarily to his Poor Bill, to
that acknowledged abortion, that unanswerable evidence of his ignorance
respecting all the fundamental relations and actions of property, and of
the social union.
As his reasonings, even so is his eloquence. One character pervades his
whole being. Words on words finely arranged, and so dexterously
consequent, that the whole bears the semblance of argument, and still
keeps awake a sense of surprise; but when all is done, nothing
rememberable has been said; no one philosophical remark, no one image,
not even a pointed aphorism. Not a sentence of Mr. Pitt’s has ever been
quoted, or formed the favourite phrase of the day, a thing unexampled in
any man of equal reputation. But while he speaks, the effect varies
according to the character of his auditor. The man of no talent is
swallowed up in surprise: and when the speech is ended, he remembers his
feelings, but nothing distinct of that which produced them; (how
opposite an effect to that of nature and genius, from whose works the
idea still remains, when the feeling is passed away, remains to connect
itself with other feelings, and combine with new impressions!). The mere
man of talent hears him with admiration, the mere man of genius with
contempt; the philosopher neither admires nor contemns, but listens to
him with a deep and solemn interest, tracing in the effects of his
eloquence the power of words and phrases, and that peculiar constitution
of human affairs in their present state, which so eminently favours this
power.
Such appears to us to be the Prime Minister of Great Britain, whether we
consider him a statesman or an orator. The same character betrays itself
in his private life, the same coldness to realities, to images of
realities, and to all whose excellence relates to reality.
He has patronised no science, he has raised no man of genius from
obscurity; he counts no one prime work of God among his friends. From
the same source he has no attachment to female society, no fondness for
children, no perceptions of beauty in natural scenery; but he is fond of
convivial indulgences, of that stimulation, which, keeping up the glow
of self-importance and the sense of internal power, gives feelings
without the mediation of ideas.
These are the elements of his mind; the accidents of his fortune, the
circumstances that enabled such a mind to acquire and retain such a
power, would form the subject of a philosophical history, and that too
of no scanty size. We scarcely furnish the chapter of contents to a work
which would comprise subjects so important and delicate, as the causes
of the diffusion and intensity of secret influence, the machinery and
state intrigue of marriages, the overbalance of the commercial interest;
the panic of property struck by the late Revolution, the
short-sightedness of the careful, the carelessness of the far-sighted;
and all those many and various events which have given to a decorous
profession of religion, and a seemliness of private morals, such an
unwonted weight in the attainment and preservation of public power. We
are unable to determine whether it be more consolatory or humiliating to
human nature, that so many complexities of event, situation, character,
age, and country, should be necessary in order to the production of a
Mr. Pitt.’
AN EXAMINATION OF MR. MALTHUS’S DOCTRINES
I. OF THE GEOMETRICAL AND ARITHMETICAL SERIES
Wallace, the author of ‘_Various Prospects of Mankind, Nature, and
Providence_,’ was the first person, we believe, who applied the
principle of the superior power of increase in population over the means
of subsistence, as an insuperable objection to the arguments for the
perfectibility of man, for which, in other respects, this author was an
advocate. He has devoted a long and elaborate Essay to prove these two
points:—1. That there is a natural and necessary inability in the means
of subsistence to go on increasing always in the same ratio as the
population, the limits of the earth necessarily limiting the actual
increase of the one, and there being no limits to the tendency to
increase in the other; 2. That the checks which have hitherto, and which
always _must_ keep population down to the level of the means of
subsistence, are _vice_ and _misery_; and consequently, that in a state
of perfectibility, as it is called, viz. in a state of perfect wisdom,
virtue, and happiness, where these indispensable checks to population,
vice and misery, were entirely removed, population would go on
increasing to an alarming and most excessive degree, and unavoidably end
in the utmost disorder, confusion, vice and misery.—(See _Various
Prospects, &c._ p. 113–123.)
The principle laid down by this author, that population could not go on
for ever increasing at its natural rate, or free from every restraint,
either moral or physical, without ultimately outstripping the utmost
possible increase of the means of subsistence, we hold to be
unquestionable, if not self-evident: the other principle assumed by the
original author, viz. that vice and misery are the only possible checks
to population, we hold to be false as a matter of fact, and peculiarly
absurd and contradictory, when applied to that state of society
contemplated by the author, that is to say, one in which abstract reason
and pure virtue, or a regard to the general good, should have got the
better of every animal instinct and selfish passion. Of this, perhaps, a
word hereafter. But be this as it may, both the principle of the
necessary increase of the population beyond the means of subsistence,
and the application of that principle as a final obstacle to all Utopian
perfectibility schemes, are borrowed (whole) by Mr. Malthus from
Wallace’s work. This is not very stoutly denied by his admirers; but,
say they, Mr. Malthus was the first to reduce the inequality between the
possible increase of food and population to a mathematical certainty, to
the arithmetical and geometrical ratios. In answer to which, we say,
that those ratios are, in a strict and scientific view of the subject,
entirely fallacious—a pure fiction. For a grain of corn or of
mustard-seed has the same or a greater power of propagating its species
than a man, till it has overspread the whole earth, till there is no
longer any room for it to grow or to spread farther. A bushel of wheat
will sow a whole field: the produce of that field will sow twenty
fields, and produce twenty harvests. Till there are no longer fields to
sow, that is, till a country or the earth is exhausted, the means of
subsistence will go on increasing in more than a geometrical ratio; will
more than double itself in every generation or season, and will more
than keep pace with the progress of population; for this is supposed
only to double itself, where it is unchecked, every twenty years.
Therefore it is not true as an abstract proposition, that of itself, or
in the nature of the growth of the produce of the earth, food can only
increase in the snail-pace progress of an arithmetical ratio, while
population goes on at a swinging geometrical rate: for the food keeps
pace, or more than keeps pace, with the population, while there is room
to grow it in, and after that room is filled up, it does not go on, even
in that arithmetical ratio—it does not increase at all, or very little.
That is, the ratio, instead of being always true, is never true at all:
neither before the soil is fully cultivated, nor afterwards. Food does
not increase in an arithmetical series in China, or even in England: it
increases in a geometrical series, or as fast as the population, in
America. The rates at which one or the other increase naturally, or can
be made to increase, have no relation to an arithmetical and geometrical
series. They are co-ordinate till the earth, or any given portion of it,
is occupied and cultivated, and, after that, they are quite
disproportionate: or rather, both stop practically at the same instant;
the means of subsistence with the limits of the soil, and the population
with the limits of the means of subsistence. All that is true of Mr.
Malthus’s doctrine, then, is this, that the tendency of population to
increase remains after the power of the earth to produce more food is
gone; that the one is limited, the other unlimited. This is enough for
the morality of the question: his mathematics are altogether spurious.
Entirely groundless as they are, they have still been of the greatest
use to Mr. Malthus, in alarming the imaginations and confounding the
understandings of his readers. For, if the case had been represented as
it stands, the increase of population would have seemed, till the limits
of the earth were full, a great moral good; and after they were passed,
a physical impossibility, the state of society remaining the same. But,
by means of the arithmetical and geometrical series, ever present to the
mental eye, and overlaying the whole question, whether applicable to it
or not, it seems, first, as if this inordinate and unequal pressure of
population on the means of subsistence was, at all times, and in all
circumstances, equally to be dreaded, and equally inevitable; and again,
as if, the more that population advanced, the greater the evil became,
the actual excess as well as the tendency to excess. For it appears by
looking at the scale, at the ‘stop-watch’ of the new system of morals
and legislation, as if, when the population is at 4, the means of
subsistence is at 3; so that there is here only a deficit of 1 in the
latter, and a small corresponding quantity of _vice_ and _misery_; but
that when it gets on to 32, the means of subsistence being only 6, here
is a necessary deficiency of food, and all the comforts of life, to 26
persons out of 32, so that life becomes an evil, and the world a
wretched lazar-house, a monstrous sink of misery and famine, one foul
abortion, in proportion as it is full of human beings enjoying the
comforts and necessaries of life. It consequently follows, that the more
we can, by the wholesome _preventive_ checks of vice and misery, keep
back the principle of population to its first stages, and the means of
subsistence to as low a level as possible, we keep these two mechanical,
and otherwise unmanageable principles, in closer harmony,—hinder the one
from pressing excessively on the other, and by producing the least
possible quantity of good, prevent the greatest possible quantity of
evil. This doctrine is false in fact and theory. Its advocates do not
understand it, nor is it intelligible. The actual existence of 26
persons in want, when there is only food for six out of 32, is a chimera
which never entered the brains of any one not an adept in Mr. Malthus’s
mathematical series; the population confessedly never can or does exceed
the means of subsistence in a literal sense; and the tendency to exceed
it in a moral sense, that is, so as to destroy the comforts and
happiness of society, and occasion vice and misery, does not depend on
the actual population supported by actual means of subsistence, but
solely on the greater or less degree of _moral restraint_, in any number
of individuals (ten hundred or ten millions), inducing them to go beyond
or stop short of impending vice and misery in the career of population.
The instant, however, any increase in population, with or without an
increase in the means of subsistence, is hinted, the disciples of Mr.
Malthus are struck with horror at the vice and misery which must ensue
to keep this double population down; nay, mention any improvement, any
reform, any addition to the comforts or necessaries of life, any
diminution of vice and misery, and the infallible result in their
apprehensive imaginations is only an incalculable increase of vice and
misery, from the increased means of subsistence, and the increased
population that would follow. They have but this one idea in their
heads; it comes in at every turn, and nothing can drive it out. Twice
last year did Major Torrens go down to the City Meeting with Mr.
Malthus’s arithmetical and geometrical ratios in his pocket, as a double
and effectual bar to Mr. Owen’s plan, or, indeed, if he is consistent,
to any other plan of reform. He appeared to consider these ratios as
decisive against any philosophical scheme of _perfectibility_, and as
proportionably inimical to any subordinate approximation to any such
ultimate visionary perfection. He argued that Mr. Owen’s ‘projected
villages,’ if realised in all their pauper splendour, and to the
projector’s heart’s content, would, by providing for the support and
increased comforts of an additional population, only (by that very
means) give a double impetus to the mechanical operation of the ratios
in question, and produce a double quantity of crime and misery, by
making the principle of population press with extended force on the
means of subsistence. This is what we cannot comprehend. Suppose Mr.
Owen’s plan, or any other, would afford double employment, double
comfort and subsistence to the poor throughout the country, where would
be the harm of this, where the objection, near or remote, except on the
false principles laid down or insinuated in Mr. Malthus’s work? For
instance, if another island such as England could by an enchanter be
conjured up in the middle of the sea, with all the same means of
subsistence, arts, trades, agriculture, manufactures, institutions,
laws, &c. as this country, we ask whether this new country would not be
a good in proportion to the number of beings maintained in such a state
of comfort: or, if these gentlemen will have it so, in proportion to the
increase of population pressing on the means of subsistence? We say it
would be a good, just in the same sense and proportion that it would be
an evil, if England as it is, with all its inhabitants, means of
subsistence, arts, trades, manufactures, agriculture, institutions,
laws, King, Lords and Commons, were sunk in the sea? Who would not weep
for England so sunk,—who would not rejoice to see another England so
rising up out of the same element? The good would be immense, and the
evil would be none: for it is evident, that though the population of
both islands would be double that of either singly, it is the height of
absurdity to suppose this would increase the tendency of the population
to press more upon the means of subsistence, or to produce a greater
quantity of vice and misery in either, than if the one or the other did
not exist. But the case is precisely the same if we suppose England
itself, _our_ England, to be doubled in population and the means of
subsistence:—if we suppose such an improvement in our arts, trade,
manufactures, agriculture, institutions, laws, every thing, possible, as
to maintain double the same number of Englishmen, in the same or in a
greater degree of comfort and enjoyment, of liberty, virtue, knowledge,
happiness, and independence. The population being doubled would not
press more unequally on double the means of subsistence, than half that
population would press on half those means of subsistence. If this
increase would be an evil, the destroying half the present population,
and half the present means of subsistence, the laying waste more lands,
the destroying arts and the implements of husbandry, the re-barbarising
and the re-enslaving the country, would be a good. The sinking the
maritime counties with all their inhabitants in the Channel, instead of
‘redeeming tracts from the sea,’ would be a great good to the community
and the State; the flooding the fen districts would do something, in
like manner, to prevent the pressure of the principle of population on
the level of the means of subsistence; and if thirty-nine out of forty
of the counties could be struck off the list of shires, and the whole
island reduced to a sand-bank, the King of England would reign,
according to these speculatists, over forty or forty thousand times the
quantity of liberty, happiness, wisdom, and virtue, that he now does,
having no subjects, or only a select few, for the principle of
population to commit its ravages upon, by overstepping the means of
subsistence. The condition of New Zealand must approach nearer to the
_beau ideal_ of political philosophy contemplated by these persons, than
the state of Great Britain in the reign of George III. Such is the
logical result of their mode of reasoning, though they do not push it to
this length;—they only apply it to the defence of all existing abuses,
and the prevention of all timely reform! Its advocates are contented to
make use of it as a lucky diversion against all Utopian projects of
perfectibility, and against every practical advance in human
improvement. But they cannot consistently stop here, for it requires not
only a shrinking back from every progressive refinement, but a perpetual
deterioration and retrograde movement from the positive advances we have
made in civilization, comfort, and population, to the lowest state of
barbarism, ignorance, and depopulation—till we come back to the age of
acorns and pig-nuts, and reduce this once flourishing, populous, free,
industrious, independent, and contented people, to a horde of wandering
savages, housing in thickets, and living on dewberries, shell-fish, and
crab-apples. _This will never do._
ON THE ORIGINALITY OF MR. MALTHUS’S ESSAY
We asserted in a former article, upon what we thought sufficient and
mature grounds, that the author of the ‘Essay on Population’ had taken
the leading principle of that essay, and the general inference built on
it, from Wallace’s work, entitled, ‘Various Prospects of Mankind, Nature
and Providence.’ We here repeat that assertion; and to enable our
readers to judge for themselves, shall give the passage in Wallace on
which it is founded. It is as follows:—
‘But without entering further into these abstracted and uncertain
speculations, it deserves our particular attention that as no Government
which hath hitherto been established is free from all seeds of
corruption, or can be expected to be eternal; so if we suppose a
Government to be perfect in its original frame, and to be administered
in the most perfect manner, after whatever model we suppose it to have
been framed, such a perfect form would be so far from lasting for ever,
that it must come to an end so much the sooner on account of its
perfection. For, though happily such Governments should be firmly
established—though they should be found consistent with the reigning
passions of human nature, though they should spread far and wide—nay,
though they should prevail universally, they must at last involve
mankind in the deepest perplexity, and in universal confusion. For how
excellent soever they may be in their own nature, they are altogether
inconsistent with the present frame of nature, and with a limited extent
of earth.
‘Under a perfect Government, the inconveniences of having a family would
be so entirely removed, children would be so well taken care of, and
every thing become so favourable to populousness, that though some
sickly seasons or dreadful plagues in particular climates might cut off
multitudes, yet in general, mankind would increase so prodigiously, that
the earth would at last be overstocked, and become unable to support its
numerous inhabitants.
‘How long the earth, with the best culture of which it is capable from
human genius and industry, might be able to nourish its perpetually
increasing inhabitants, is as impossible as it is unnecessary to be
determined. It is not probable that it could have supported them during
so long a period as since the creation of Adam. But whatever may be
supposed of the length of this period, of necessity it must be granted,
that the earth could not nourish them for ever, unless either its
fertility could be continually augmented, or by some secret in nature,
like what certain enthusiasts have expected from the philosopher’s
stone, some wise adept in the occult sciences should invent a method of
supporting mankind quite different from any thing known at present. Nay,
though some extraordinary method of supporting them might possibly be
found out, yet if there was no bound to the increase of mankind, which
would be the case under a perfect Government, there would not even be
sufficient room for containing their bodies upon the surface of the
earth, or upon any limited surface whatsoever. It would be necessary,
therefore, in order to find room for such multitudes of men, that the
earth should be continually enlarging in bulk, as an animal or vegetable
body.
‘Now since philosophers may as soon attempt to make mankind immortal, as
to support the animal frame without food, it is equally certain that
limits are set to the fertility of the earth; and that its bulk, so far
as is hitherto known, hath continued always the same, and probably could
not be much altered without making considerable changes in the solar
system. It would be impossible, therefore, to support the great numbers
of men who would be raised up under a perfect government; the earth
would be overstocked at last, and the greatest admirers of such fanciful
schemes must foresee the fatal period when they would come to an end, as
they are altogether inconsistent with the limits of that earth in which
they must exist.
‘What a miserable catastrophe of the most generous of all human systems
of Government! How dreadfully would the Magistrates of such
commonwealths find themselves disconcerted at that fatal period, when
there was no longer any room for new colonies, and when the earth could
produce no farther supplies! During all the preceding ages, while there
was room for increase, mankind must have been happy; the earth must have
been a paradise in the literal sense, as the greatest part of it must
have been turned into delightful and fruitful gardens. But when the
dreadful time should at last come, when our globe, by the most diligent
culture, could not produce what was sufficient to nourish its numerous
inhabitants, what happy expedient could then be found out to remedy so
great an evil?
‘In such a cruel necessity, must there be a law to restrain marriage?
Must multitudes of women be shut up in cloisters, like the ancient
vestals or modern nuns? To keep a balance between the two sexes, must a
proportionable number of men be debarred from marriage? Shall the
Utopians, following the wicked policy of superstition, forbid their
priests to marry; or shall they rather sacrifice men of some other
profession for the good of the state? Or shall they appoint the sons of
certain families to be maimed at their birth, and give a sanction to the
unnatural institution of eunuchs? If none of these expedients can be
thought proper, shall they appoint a certain number of infants to be
exposed to death as soon as they are born, determining the proportion
according to the exigencies of the state; and pointing out the
particular victims by lot, or according to some established rule? Or,
must they shorten the period of human life by a law, and condemn all to
die after they had completed a certain age, which might be shorter or
longer, as provisions were either more scanty or plentiful? Or, what
other method should they devise (for an expedient would be absolutely
necessary) to restrain the number of citizens within reasonable bounds?
‘Alas! how unnatural and inhuman must every such expedient be accounted!
The natural passions and appetites of mankind are planted in our frame,
to answer the best ends for the happiness both of the individuals and of
the species. Shall we be obliged to contradict such a wise order? Shall
we be laid under the necessity of acting barbarously and inhumanly? Sad
and fatal necessity! And which, after all, could never answer the end,
but would give rise to violence and war. For mankind would never agree
about such regulations. Force, and arms, must at last decide their
quarrels, and the deaths of such as fell in battle, leave sufficient
provisions for the survivors, and make room for others to be born.
‘Thus the tranquillity and numerous blessings of the Utopian governments
would come to an end; war, or cruel and unnatural customs, be
introduced, and a stop put to the increase of mankind, to the
advancement of knowledge, and to the culture of the earth, in spite of
the most excellent laws and wisest precautions. The more excellent the
laws had been, and the more strictly they had been observed, mankind
must have sooner become miserable. The remembrance of former times, the
greatness of their wisdom and virtue, would conspire to heighten their
distress; and the world, instead of remaining the mansion of wisdom and
happiness, become the scene of vice and confusion. Force and fraud must
prevail, and mankind be reduced to the same calamitous condition as at
present.
‘Such a melancholy situation, in consequence merely of the want of
provisions, is, in truth, more unnatural than all their present
calamities. Supposing men to have abused their liberty, by which abuse
vice has once been introduced into the world; and that wrong notions, a
bad taste, and vicious habits have been strengthened by the defects of
education and government, our present distresses may be easily
explained. They may even be called natural, being the natural
consequences of our depravity. They may be supposed to be the means by
which Providence punishes vice; and by setting bounds to the increase of
mankind, prevents the earth’s being overstocked, and men being laid
under the cruel necessity of killing one another. But to suppose that,
in the course of a favourable Providence, a perfect government had been
established, under which the disorders of human passions had been
powerfully corrected and restrained; poverty, idleness, and war
banished; the earth made a paradise; universal friendship and concord
established, and human society rendered flourishing in all respects; and
that such a lovely Constitution should be overturned, not by the vices
of men, or their abuse of liberty, but by the order of nature itself,
seems wholly unnatural, and altogether disagreeable to the methods of
Providence.
‘By reasoning in this manner, it is not pretended that ’tis unnatural to
set bounds to human knowledge and happiness, or to the grandeur of
society, and to confine what is finite to proper limits. It is certainly
fit to set just bounds to every thing according to its nature, and to
adjust all things in due proportion to one another. Undoubtedly, such an
excellent order is actually established throughout all the works of God,
in his wide dominions. But there are certain primary determinations in
nature, to which all other things of a subordinate kind must be
adjusted. A limited earth, a limited degree of fertility, and the
continual increase of mankind, are three of these original
constitutions. To these determinations, human affairs, and the
circumstance of all other animals, must be adapted. In which view, it is
unsuitable to our ideas of order, that while the earth is only capable
of maintaining a determined number, the human race should increase
without end. This would be the necessary consequence of a perfect
government and education. On which account it is more contrary to just
proportion, to suppose that such a perfect government should be
established, in such circumstances, than that by permitting vice, or the
abuse of liberty, in the wisdom of Providence, mankind should never be
able to multiply so as to be able to overstock the earth.
‘From this view of the circumstances of the world, notwithstanding the
high opinion we have of the merits of Sir Thomas More, and other admired
projectors of perfect governments in ancient or modern times, we may
discern how little can be expected from their most perfect systems.
‘As for those worthy philosophers, patriots, and law-givers, who have
employed their talents in framing such excellent models, we ought to do
justice to their characters, and gratefully to acknowledge their
generous efforts to rescue the world out of that distress into which it
has fallen, through the imperfection of government. Sincere, and ardent
in their love of virtue, enamoured of its lovely form, deeply interested
for the happiness of mankind, to the best of their skill, and with
hearts full of zeal, they have strenuously endeavoured to advance human
society to perfection. For this, their memory ought to be sacred to
posterity. But if they expected their beautiful systems actually to take
place, their hopes were ill founded, and they were not sufficiently
aware of the consequences.
‘The speculations of such ingenious authors enlarge our views, and amuse
our fancies. They are useful for directing us to correct certain errors
at particular times. Able legislators ought to consider them as models,
and honest patriots ought never to lose sight of them, or any proper
opportunity of transplanting the wisest of their maxims into their own
governments, as far as they are adapted to their particular
circumstances, and will give no occasion to dangerous convulsions. But
this is all that can be expected. Though such ingenious romances should
chance to be read and admired, jealous and selfish politicians need not
be alarmed. Such statesmen need not fear that ever such airy systems
shall be able to destroy their craft, or disappoint them of their
intention to sacrifice the interests of mankind to their own avarice or
ambition. There is too powerful a charm, which works secretly in favour
of such politicians, which will for ever defeat all attempts to
establish a perfect government. There is no need of miracles for this
purpose. The vices of mankind are sufficient. And we need not doubt but
Providence will make use of them, for preventing the establishment of
governments which are by no means suitable to the present circumstances
of the earth.’—See ‘Various Prospects of Mankind, Nature, and
Providence,’ chap. 4. p. 113. 1761.
Here then we have not only the same argument stated, but stated in the
same connexion, and brought to bear on the very same subject to which it
is applied by the author of the Essay on Population. The principle, and
the consequences deduced from it, are exactly the same. It may happen
(and often does) that one man is the first to make a particular
discovery or observation, and that another draws from it an important
inference of which the former was not at all aware. But this is not the
case in the present instance. As far as general reasoning will go, it is
impossible that any thing should be stated more clearly, more fully and
explicitly, than Wallace has here stated the argument against the
progressive and ultimate amelioration of human society, from the sole
principle of population. We have already seen that the addition which
Mr. Malthus has made to the argument, from the geometrical and
arithmetical series, is a fallacy, and not an improvement. The
conclusion itself insisted on in the above passage, by Wallace, appears
to us no better than a contradiction in terms. Of the possibility of
realising such a Utopian system as he first supposes, that is, of making
every motive and principle of action in the human mind absolutely and
completely subservient to the dictates of reason and the calculation of
consequences, we do not say a word; but we _do_ say, that if such a
system is possible, and if it were realised, it would not be destroyed
by the principle of population, that is, by the unrestrained propagation
of the species from a blind, headlong, instinctive, irrational impulse,
and with a total and sovereign disregard of the fatal and overwhelming
consequences which would ensue. The argument is a solecism; but if
Wallace shewed his ingenuity in inventing it, Mr. Malthus has not shown
his judgment in adopting it. Through the whole of the first edition of
the Essay on Population, the author assumed the impulse to propagate the
species as a law, and a physical necessity of the same force as that of
preserving the individual, or, in other words, he sets down, 1st,
hunger, 2d, the sexual appetite, as two co-ordinate, and equally
irresistible principles of action. It was necessary that he should do
this, in order to bear out his conclusion against the Utopian systems of
his antagonists; for, in order to maintain that this principle of
population would be proof against the highest possible degree of reason,
we must suppose it to be an absolute physical necessity. If reason has
any practical power over it, the highest reason must be able to attain
an habitual power over it. Mr. Malthus, however, having by the rigid
interpretation which he gave to his favourite principle, or by what he
called the _iron law of necessity_, succeeded in laying the bugbear of
the modern philosophy, relaxed considerably in the second and following
editions of his book, in which he introduced _moral restraint_ as a
third check upon the principle of population, in addition to the two
only ones of vice and misery, with which he before combated the Utopian
philosophers; and though he does not lay an exaggerated or consistent
stress on this third check, yet he thinks something may be done to
lighten the intolerable pressure, the heavy hand of vice and misery, by
flattering old maids, and frightening the poor into the practice of
moral restraint! It will be recollected by those who are familiar with
the history of Mr. Malthus’s writings, that his first and grand effort
was directed against the modern philosophy. The use which this author
has since made of his principle, and of the arithmetical and geometrical
ratios to shut up the workhouse, to _snub_ the poor, to stint them in
their wages, to deny them relief from the parish, and preach lectures to
them on the new invented crime of matrimony, was an afterthought; of the
merit of which we shall speak in another article.
ON THE PRINCIPLE OF POPULATION AS AFFECTING THE SCHEMES OF UTOPIAN
IMPROVEMENT
‘A swaggering paradox, when once explained, soon sinks into an unmeaning
common-place.’
This excellent saying of a great man was never more strictly applicable
to any system than it is to Mr. Malthus’s paradox, and his explanation
of it. It seemed, on the first publication of the Essay on Population,
as if the whole world was going to be turned topsy-turvy, all our ideas
of moral good and evil, were in a manner confounded, we scarcely knew
whether we stood on our head or our heels: but after exciting
considerable expectation, giving us a good shake, and making us a little
dizzy, Mr. Malthus does as we do when we shew the children
_London_,—sets us on our feet again, and every thing goes on as before.
The common notions that prevailed on this subject, till our author’s
first population-scheme tended to weaken them, were that life is a
blessing, and that the more people could be maintained in any state in a
tolerable degree of health, comfort and decency, the better: that want
and misery are not desirable in themselves, that famine is not to be
courted for its own sake, that wars, disease and pestilence are not what
every friend of his country or his species should pray for in the first
place: that vice in its different shapes is a thing that the world could
do very well without, and that if it could be got rid of altogether, it
would be a great gain. In short, that the object both of the moralist
and politician was to diminish as much as possible the quantity of vice
and misery existing in the world: without apprehending that by thus
effectually introducing more virtue and happiness, more reason and good
sense, that by improving the manners of a people, removing pernicious
habits and principles of acting, or securing greater plenty, and a
greater number of mouths to partake of it, they were doing a disservice
to humanity. Then comes Mr. Malthus with his octavo book, and tells us
there is another great evil, which had never been found out, or at least
not sufficiently attended to till his time, namely, excessive
population: that this evil was infinitely greater and more to be dreaded
than all others put together; and that its approach could only be
checked by vice and misery: that any increase of virtue or happiness was
the direct way to hasten it on; and that in proportion as we attempted
to improve the condition of mankind, and lessened the restraints of vice
and misery, we threw down the only barriers that could protect us from
this most formidable scourge of the species, population. Vice and misery
were indeed evils, but they were absolutely necessary evils; necessary
to prevent the introduction of others of an incalculably and
inconceivably greater magnitude; and that every proposal to lessen their
actual quantity, on which the measure of our safety depended, might be
attended with the most ruinous consequences, and ought to be looked upon
with horror. I think that this description of the tendency and
complexion of Mr. Malthus’s first essay is not in the least exaggerated,
but an exact and faithful picture of the impression, which is made on
every one’s mind.
After taking some time to recover from the surprise and hurry into which
so great a discovery would naturally throw him, he comes forward again
with a large quarto, in which he is at great pains both to say and unsay
all that he has said in his former volume; and upon the whole concludes,
that population is in itself a good thing, that it is never likely to do
much harm, that virtue and happiness ought to be promoted by every
practicable means, and that the most effectual as well as desirable
check to excessive population is _moral restraint_. The mighty discovery
thus reduced to, and pieced out by common sense, the wonder vanishes,
and we breathe a little freely again. Mr. Malthus is, however, by no
means willing to give up his old doctrine, or _eat his own words_: he
stickles stoutly for it at times. He has his fits of reason and his fits
of extravagance, his yielding and his obstinate moments, fluctuating
between the two, and vibrating backwards and forwards with a dexterity
of self-contradiction which it is wonderful to behold. The following
passage is so curious in this respect that I cannot help quoting it in
this place. Speaking of the Reply of the author of the Political Justice
to his former work, he observes, ‘But Mr. Godwin says, that if he looks
into the past history of the world, he does not see that increasing
population has been controlled and confined by vice and misery _alone_.
_In this observation I cannot agree with him._ I will thank Mr. Godwin
to name to me any check, that in past ages has contributed to keep down
the population to the level of the means of subsistence, that does not
fairly come under some form of vice or misery; except indeed the check
of _moral restraint, which I have mentioned in the course of this work_;
and which to say the truth, whatever hopes we may entertain of its
prevalence in future, has undoubtedly in past ages operated with very
inconsiderable force.’[65] When I assure the reader that I give him this
passage fairly and fully, I think he will be of opinion with me, that it
would be difficult to produce an instance of a more miserable attempt to
reconcile a contradiction by childish evasion, to insist upon an
argument, and give it up in the same breath. Does Mr. Malthus really
think that he has such an absolute right and authority over this subject
of population, that provided he mentions a principle, or shews that he
is not ignorant of it, and cannot be caught _napping_ by the critics, he
is at liberty to say that it has or has not had any operation, just as
he pleases, and that the state of the fact is a matter of perfect
indifference? He contradicts the opinion of Mr. Godwin that vice and
misery are not the only checks to population, and gives as a proof of
his assertion, that he himself truly has mentioned another check. Thus
after flatly denying that moral restraint has any effect at all, he
modestly concludes by saying that it has had some, no doubt, but
promises that it will never have a great deal. Yet in the very next
page, he says, ‘On this sentiment, whether virtue, prudence or pride,
which I have already noticed under the name of moral restraint, or of
the more comprehensive title, the _preventive_ check, it will appear,
that in the sequel of this work, I shall lay considerable stress.’ p.
385. This kind of reasoning is enough to give one the headache.
The most singular thing in this singular performance of our author is,
that it should have been originally ushered into the world as the most
complete and only satisfactory answer to the speculations of Godwin,
Condorcet and others, or to what has been called the modern philosophy.
A more complete piece of wrong-headedness, a more strange perversion of
reason could hardly be devised by the wit of man. Whatever we may think
of the doctrine of the progressive improvement of the human mind, or of
a state of society in which every thing will be subject to the absolute
control of reason, however absurd, unnatural, or impracticable we may
conceive such a system to be, certainly it cannot without the grossest
inconsistency be objected to it, that such a system would necessarily be
rendered abortive, because if reason should ever get the mastery over
all our actions, we shall then be governed entirely by our physical
appetites and passions, without the least regard to consequences. This
appears to me a refinement on absurdity. Several philosophers and
speculatists had supposed that a certain state of society very different
from any that has hitherto existed was in itself practicable; and that
if it were realised, it would be productive of a far greater degree of
human happiness than is compatible with the present institutions of
society. I have nothing to do with either of these points. I will allow
to any one who pleases that all such schemes are ‘false, sophistical,
unfounded in the extreme.’ But I cannot agree with Mr. Malthus that they
would be _bad_, in proportion as they were _good_; that their excellence
would be their ruin; or that the true and only unanswerable objection
against all such schemes is that very degree of happiness, virtue, and
improvement, to which they are supposed to give rise. And I cannot agree
with him in this, because it is contrary to common sense, and leads to
the subversion of every principle of moral reasoning. Without perplexing
himself with the subtle arguments of his opponents, Mr. Malthus comes
boldly forward, and says, ‘Gentlemen, I am willing to make you large
concessions, I am ready to allow the practicability and the
desirableness of your schemes; the more happiness, the more virtue, the
more refinement they are productive of, the better; all these will only
add to the “exuberant strength of my argument”; I have a short answer to
all objections, to be sure I found it in an old political receipt-book,
called Prospects, &c. by one Wallace, a man not much known, but no
matter for that, _finding is keeping_, you know:’ and with one smart
stroke of his wand, on which are inscribed certain mystical characters,
and algebraic proportions, he levels the fairy enchantment with the
ground. For, says Mr. Malthus, though this improved state of society
were actually realised, it could not possibly continue, but must soon
terminate in a state of things pregnant with evils far more
insupportable than any we at present endure, in consequence of the
excessive population which would follow, and the impossibility of
providing for its support.
This is what I do not understand. It is, in other words, to assert that
the doubling the population of a country, for example, after a certain
period, will be attended with the most pernicious effects, by want,
famine, bloodshed, and a state of general violence and confusion; this
will afterwards lead to vices and practices still worse than the
physical evils they are designed to prevent, &c. and yet that at this
period those who will be the most interested in preventing these
consequences, and the best acquainted with the circumstances that lead
to them, will neither have the understanding to foresee, nor the heart
to feel, nor the will to prevent the sure evils to which they expose
themselves and others, though this advanced state of population, which
does not admit of any addition without danger is supposed to be the
immediate result of a more general diffusion of the comforts and
conveniences of life, of more enlarged and liberal views, of a more
refined and comprehensive regard to our own permanent interests, as well
as those of others, of correspondent habits and manners, and of a state
of things, in which our gross animal appetites will be subjected to the
practical control of reason. The influence of rational motives, of
refined and long-sighted views of things is supposed to have taken the
place of narrow, selfish, and merely sensual motives: this is implied in
the very statement of the question. ‘What conjuration and what mighty
magic’ should thus blind our philosophical descendants on this single
subject in which they are more interested than in all the rest, so that
they should stand with their eyes open on the edge of a precipice, and
instead of retreating from it, should throw themselves down headlong, I
cannot comprehend; unless indeed we suppose that the impulse to
propagate the species is so strong and uncontrolable, that reason has no
power over it. This is what Mr. Malthus was at one time strongly
disposed to assert, and what he is at present half inclined to retract.
Without this foundation to rest on, the whole of his reasoning is
unintelligible. It seems to me a most childish way of answering any one,
who chooses to assert that mankind are capable of being governed
entirely by their reason, and that it would be better for them if they
were, to say, No, for if they were governed entirely by it, they would
be much less able to attend to its dictates than they are at present:
and the evils, which would thus follow from the unrestrained increase of
population, would be excessive.—Almost every little Miss, who has had
the advantage of a boarding-school education, or been properly tutored
by her mamma, whose hair is not of an absolute flame-colour, and who has
hopes in time, if she behaves prettily, of getting a good husband, waits
patiently year after year, looks about her, rejects or trifles with half
a dozen lovers, favouring one, laughing at another, chusing among them
‘as one picks pears, saying, this I like, that I loathe,’ with the
greatest indifference, as if it were no such very pressing affair, and
_all the while behaves very prettily_:—why, what an idea does Mr.
Malthus give us of the grave, masculine genius of our Utopian
philosophers, their sublime attainments and gigantic energy, that they
will not be able to manage these matters as decently and cleverly as the
silliest woman can do at present! Mr. Malthus indeed endeavours to
soften the absurdity by saying that moral restraint at present owes its
strength to selfish motives: what is that to the purpose? If Mr. Malthus
chooses to say, that men will always be governed by the same gross
mechanical motives that they are at present, I have no objection to make
to it; but it is shifting the question: it is not arguing against the
state of society we are considering from the consequences to which it
would give rise, but against the possibility of its ever existing. It is
absurd to object to a system on account of the consequences which would
follow if we once suppose men to be actuated by entirely different
motives and principles from what they are at present, and then to say,
that those consequences would necessarily follow, because men would
never be what we suppose them. It is very idle to alarm the imagination
by deprecating the evils that must follow from the practical adoption of
a particular scheme, yet to allow that we have no reason to dread those
consequences, but because the scheme itself is impracticable.—But I am
ashamed of wasting the reader’s time and my own in thus beating the air.
It is not however my fault that Mr. Malthus has written nonsense, or
that others have admired it. It is not Mr. Malthus’s nonsense, but the
opinion of the world respecting it, that I would be thought to
compliment by this serious refutation of what in itself neither deserves
nor admits of any reasoning upon it. If, however, we recollect the
source from whence Mr. Malthus borrowed his principle and the
application of it to improvements in political philosophy, we must allow
that he is merely passive in error. The principle itself would not have
been worth a farthing to him without the application, and accordingly he
took them as he found them lying snug together; and as Trim having
converted the old jack-boots into a pair of new mortars immediately
planted them against whichever of my uncle Toby’s garrisons the allies
were then busy in besieging, so the public-spirited gallantry of our
modern engineer directed him to bend the whole force of his clumsy
discovery against that system of philosophy which was the most talked of
at the time, but to which it was the least applicable of all others.
Wallace, I have no doubt, took up his idea either as a paradox, or a
_jeu d’esprit_, or because any thing, he thought, was of weight enough
to overturn what had never existed any where but in the imagination; or
he was led into a piece of false logic by an error we are very apt to
fall into, of supposing because he had never been struck himself by the
difficulty of population in such a state of society, that therefore the
people themselves would not find it out, nor make any provision against
it. But though I can in some measure excuse a lively paradox, I do not
think the same favour is to be shewn to the dull, dogged, voluminous
repetition of an absurdity.
I cannot help thinking that our author has been too much influenced in
his different feelings on this subject, by the particular purpose he had
in view at the time. Mr. Malthus might not improperly have taken for the
motto of his first edition,—‘These three bear record on earth, vice,
misery, and population.’ In his answer to Mr. Godwin, this principle was
represented as an evil, for which no remedy could be found but in
evil;—that its operation was mechanical, unceasing, necessary; that it
went straight forward to its end, unchecked by fear, or reason, or
remorse; that the evils, which it drew after it, could only be avoided
by other evils, by actual vice and misery. Population was, in fact, the
great Devil, the untamed Beelzebub that was only kept chained down by
vice and misery, and which, if it were once let loose from these
restraints, would go forth, and ravage the earth. That they were, of
course, the two main props and pillars of society, and that the lower
and weaker they kept this principle, the better able they were to
contend with it: that therefore any diminution of that degree of them,
which at present prevails, and is found sufficient to keep the world in
order, was of all things chiefly to be dreaded.—Mr. Malthus seems fully
aware of the importance of the stage-maxim, To elevate and surprise.
Having once heated the imaginations of his readers, he knows that he can
afterwards mould them into whatever shape he pleases. All this bustle
and terror, and stage-effect, and theatrical mummery was only to serve a
temporary purpose, for all of a sudden the scene is shifted, and the
storm subsides. Having frighted away the boldest champions of modern
philosophy, this monstrous appearance, full of strange and inexplicable
horrors, is suffered quietly to shrink back to its natural dimensions,
and we find it to be nothing more than a common-sized tame looking
animal, which however requires a chain and the whip of its keeper to
prevent it from becoming mischievous. Mr. Malthus then steps forward and
says, ‘The evil we were all in danger of was not population,—but
philosophy. Nothing is to be done with the latter by mere reasoning. I,
therefore, thought it right to make use of a little terror to accomplish
the end. As to the principle of population you need be under no alarm;
only leave it to me, and I shall be able to manage it very well. All its
dreadful consequences may be easily prevented by a proper application of
the motives of common prudence and common decency.’ If, however, any one
should be at a loss to know how it is possible to reconcile such
contradictions, I would suggest to Mr. Malthus the answer which Hamlet
makes to his friend Guildenstern, ‘’Tis as easy as lying: govern these
ventiges (the poor-rates and private charity) with your fingers and
thumb, and this same instrument will discourse most excellent music;
look you, here are the stops,’ (namely, Mr. Malthus’s Essay and Mr.
Whitbread’s Poor Bill).[66]
ON THE APPLICATION OF MR. MALTHUS’S PRINCIPLE TO THE POOR LAWS
In speaking of the abolition of the Poor Laws, Mr. Malthus says:—
‘To this end, I should propose a regulation to be made, declaring, that
no child born from any marriage, taking place after the expiration of a
year from the date of the law, and no illegitimate child born two years
from the same date, should ever be entitled to parish assistance. And to
give a more general knowledge of this law, and to enforce it more
strongly on the minds of the lower classes of people, the clergyman of
each parish should, after the publication of banns, read a short
address, stating the strong obligation on every man to support his own
children; the impropriety, and even immorality, of marrying without a
prospect of being able to do this; the evils which had resulted to the
poor themselves from the attempt which had been made to assist by public
institutions in a duty which ought to be exclusively appropriated to
parents; and the absolute necessity which had at length appeared of
abandoning all such institutions, on account of their producing effects
totally opposite to those which were intended.
‘This would operate as a fair, distinct, and precise notice, which no
man could well mistake, and, without pressing hard on any particular
individuals, would at once throw off the rising generation from that
miserable and helpless dependence upon the government and the rich, the
moral as well as physical consequences of which are almost incalculable.
‘After the public notice which I have proposed had been given, and the
system of poor-laws had ceased with regard to the rising generation, if
any man chose to marry, without a prospect of being able to support a
family, he should have the most perfect liberty so to do. Though to
marry, in this case, is, in my opinion, clearly an immoral act, yet it
is not one which society can justly take upon itself to prevent or
punish; because the punishment provided for it by the laws of nature
falls directly and most severely upon the individual who commits the
act, and through him, only more remotely and feebly, on the society.
When Nature will govern and punish for us, it is a very miserable
ambition to wish to snatch the rod from her hands, and draw upon
ourselves the odium of executioner. To the punishment therefore of
Nature he should be left, the punishment of want. He has erred in the
face of a most clear and precise warning, and can have no just reason to
complain of any persons but himself when he feels the consequences of
his error. All parish assistance should be most rigidly denied him; and
he should be left to the uncertain support of private charity. He should
be taught to know, that the laws of Nature, which are the laws of God,
had doomed him and his family to starve,[67] for disobeying their
repeated admonitions; that he had no claim of _right_ on society for the
smallest portion of food, beyond that which his labour would fairly
purchase; and that if he and his family were saved from feeling the
natural consequences of his imprudence, he would owe it to the pity of
some kind benefactor, to whom, therefore, he ought to be bound by the
strongest ties of gratitude.’
This passage has been well answered by Mr. Cobbett in one word,
‘Parson’;—the most expressive apostrophe that ever was made; and it
might be answered as effectually by another word, which I shall omit.
When Mr. Malthus asserts, that the poor man and his family have been
doomed to starve by the laws of nature, which are the laws of God, he
means by the laws of God and nature, the physical and necessary
inability of the earth to supply food for more than a certain number of
human beings; but if he means that the wants of the poor arise from the
impossibility of procuring food for them, while the rich roll in
abundance, or, we will say, maintain their dogs and horses, &c. out of
their ostentatious superfluities, he asserts what he knows not to be
true. Mr. Malthus wishes to confound the necessary limits of the produce
of the earth with the arbitrary and artificial distribution of that
produce according to the institutions of society, or the caprice of
individuals, the laws of God and nature with the laws of man. And what
proves the fallacy is, that the laws of man in the present case actually
afford the relief, which he would wilfully deny; he proposes to repeal
those laws, and then to tell the poor man impudently, that ‘the laws of
God and nature have doomed him and his family to starve, for disobeying
their repeated admonitions,’ stuck on the church-door for the last
twelve months! ’Tis much.
I have in a separate work made the following remarks on the above
proposal, which are a little cavalier, not too cavalier;—a little
contemptuous, not too contemptuous; a little gross, but not too gross
for the subject.—
‘I am not sorry that I am at length come to this passage. It will I hope
decide the reader’s opinion of the benevolence, wisdom, piety, candour,
and disinterested simplicity of Mr. Malthus’s mind. Any comments that I
might make upon it to strengthen this impression must be faint and
feeble. I give up the task of doing justice to the moral beauties that
pervade every line of it, in despair. There are some instances of an
heroical contempt for the narrow prejudices of the world, of a perfect
refinement from the vulgar feelings of human nature, that must only
suffer by a comparison with any thing else.
I shall not myself be so uncandid as not to confess, that I think the
poor laws bad things; and that it would be well, if they could be got
rid of, consistently with humanity and justice. This I do not think they
could in the present state of things, and other circumstances remaining
as they are. The reason why I object to Mr. Malthus’s plan is, that it
does not go to the root of the evil, or attack it in its principle, but
its effects. He confounds the cause with the effect. The wide spreading
tyranny, dependence, indolence, and unhappiness, of which Mr. Malthus is
so sensible, are not occasioned by the increase of the poor-rates, but
these are the natural consequence of that increasing tyranny,
dependence, indolence, and unhappiness occasioned by other causes.
Mr. Malthus desires his readers to look at the enormous proportion in
which the poor-rates have increased within the last ten years. But have
they increased in any greater proportion than the other taxes, which
rendered them necessary, and, which I think, were employed for much more
mischievous purposes? I would ask, what have the poor got by their
encroachments for the last ten years? Do they work less hard? Are they
better fed? Do they marry oftener, and with better prospects? Are they
grown pampered and insolent? Have they changed places with the rich?
Have they been cunning enough, by means of the poor-laws, to draw off
all their wealth and superfluities from the men of property? Have they
got so much as a quarter of an hour’s leisure, a farthing candle, or a
cheese-paring more than they had? Has not the price of provisions risen
enormously? Has not the price of labour almost stood still? Have not the
government and the rich had their way in every thing? Have they not
gratified their ambition, their pride, their obstinacy, their ruinous
extravagance? Have they not squandered the resources of the country as
they pleased? Have they not heaped up wealth on themselves, and their
dependents? Have they not multiplied sinecures, places, and pensions?
Have they not doubled the salaries of those that existed before? Has
there been any want of new creations of peers, who would thus be
impelled to beget heirs to their titles and estates, and saddle the
younger branches of their rising families, by means of their new
influence, on the country at large? Has there been any want of
contracts, of loans, of monopolies of corn, of a good understanding
between the rich and the powerful to assist one another, and to fleece
the poor? Have the poor prospered? Have the rich declined? What then
have they to complain of? What ground is there for the apprehension,
that wealth is secretly changing hands, and that the whole property of
the country will shortly be absorbed in the poor’s fund? Do not the poor
create their own fund? Is not the necessity for such a fund first
occasioned by the unequal weight with which the rich press upon the
poor; and has not the increase of that fund in the last ten years been
occasioned by the additional exorbitant demands, which have been made
upon the poor and industrious, which, without some assistance from the
public, they could not possibly have answered? Whatever is the increase
in the nominal amount of the poor’s fund, will not the rich always be
able ultimately to throw the burthen of it on the poor themselves? But
Mr. Malthus is a man of general principles. He cares little about these
circumstantial details, and petty objections. He takes higher ground. He
deduces all his conclusions, by an infallible logic, from the laws of
God and nature. When our Essayist shall prove to me, that by these paper
bullets of the brain, by his ratios of the increase of food, and the
increase of mankind, he has prevented one additional tax, or taken off
one oppressive duty, that he has made a single rich man retrench one
article at his table: that he has made him keep a dog or a horse the
less, or part with a single vice, arguing from a mathematical
admeasurement of the size of the earth, and the number of inhabitants it
can contain, he shall have my perfect leave to disclaim the right of the
poor to subsistence, and to tie them down by severe penalties to their
good behaviour, on the same profound principles. But why does Mr.
Malthus practise his demonstrations on the poor only? Why are they to
have a perfect system of rights and duties prescribed to them? I do not
see why they alone should be put to live on these metaphysical
board-wages, why they should be forced to submit to a course of
_abstraction_; or why it should be meat and drink to them, more than to
others, to do the will of God. Mr. Malthus’s gospel is preached only to
the poor!—Even if I approved of our author’s plan, I should object to
the principle on which it is founded. The parson of the parish, when a
poor man comes to be married—No, not so fast. The author does not say,
whether the lecture he proposes is to be read to the poor only, or to
all ranks of people. Would it not sound oddly, if when the squire, who
is himself worth a hundred thousand pounds, is going to be married to
the rector’s daughter, who is to have fifty, the curate should read them
a formal lecture on their obligation to maintain their own children and
not turn them on the parish? Would it be necessary to go through the
form of the address, when an amorous couple of eighty presented
themselves at the altar? If the admonition were left to the parson’s own
discretion, what affronts would he not subject himself to, from his
neglect of old maids, and superannuated widows, and from his applying
himself familiarly to the little shopkeeper, or thriving mechanic? Well,
then, let us suppose that a very poor hard-working man comes to be
married, and that the clergyman can take the liberty with him: he is to
warn him first against fornication, and in the next place against
matrimony. These are the two greatest sins which a poor man can commit,
who can neither be supposed to keep his wife, nor his girl. Mr. Malthus,
however, does not think them equal: for he objects strongly to a country
fellow’s marrying a girl whom he has debauched, or, as the phrase is,
making an honest woman of her, as aggravating the crime; because, by
this means, the parish will probably have three or four children to
maintain instead of one. However, as it seems rather too late to give
advice to a man who is actually come to be married, it is most natural
to suppose that he would marry the young woman in spite of the lecture.
Here then he errs in the face of a precise warning, and should be left
to the punishment of _nature_, the punishment of severe want. When he
begins to feel the consequences of his error, all parish assistance is
to be rigidly denied him, and the interests of humanity imperiously
require that all other assistance should be withheld from him, or most
sparingly administered. In the meantime, to reconcile him to this
treatment, and let him see that he has nobody to complain of but
himself, the parson of the parish comes to him with the certificate of
his marriage, and a copy of the warning he had given him at the time, by
which he is taught to know that the laws of nature, which are the laws
of God, had doomed him and his family to starve for disobeying their
repeated admonitions; that he had no claim of right to the smallest
portion of food beyond what his labour would actually purchase; and that
he ought to kiss the feet and lick the dust off the shoes of him, who
gave him a reprieve from the just sentence which the laws of God and
nature had passed upon him. To make this clear to him, it would be
necessary to put the Essay on Population into his hands, to instruct him
in the nature of a geometrical and arithmetical series, in the necessary
limits to population from the size of the earth; and here would come in
Mr. Malthus’s plan of education for the poor, writing, arithmetic, the
use of the globes, &c. for the purpose of proving to them the necessity
of their being starved. It cannot be supposed that the poor man (what
with his poverty and what with being priest-ridden) should be able to
resist this body of evidence, he would open his eyes to his error, and
“would submit to the sufferings that were absolutely irremediable, with
the fortitude of a man, and the resignation of a Christian.” He and his
family might then be sent round the parish in a starving condition,
accompanied by the constables and _quondam_ overseers of the poor, to
see that no person, blind to “the interests of humanity,” practised upon
them the abominable deception of attempting to relieve their remediless
sufferings; and by the parson of the parish, to point out to the
spectators the inevitable consequences of sinning against the laws of
God and man. By celebrating a number of these _Auto da fes_ yearly in
every parish, the greatest publicity would be given to the principle of
population, “the strict line of duty would be pointed out to every man,”
enforced by the most powerful sanctions; justice and humanity would
flourish, they would be understood to signify that the poor have no
right to live by their labour, and that the feelings of compassion and
benevolence are best shewn by denying them charity; the poor would no
longer be dependent on the rich, the rich could no longer wish to reduce
the poor into a more complete subjection to their will, all causes of
contention, of jealousy, and of irritation would have ceased between
them, the struggle would be over, each class would fulfil the task
assigned by heaven; the rich would oppress the poor without remorse, the
poor would submit to oppression with a pious gratitude and resignation;
the greatest harmony would prevail between the government and the
people; there would be no longer any seditions, tumults, complaints,
petitions, partisans of liberty, or tools of power; no grumbling, no
repining, no discontented men of talents proposing reforms, and
frivolous remedies, but we should all have the same gaiety and lightness
of heart, and the same happy spirit of resignation that a man feels when
he is seized with the plague, who thinks no more of the physician, but
knows that his disorder is without cure. The best-laid schemes are
subject, however, to unlucky reverses. Some such seem to lie in the way
of that pleasing Euthanasia, and contented submission to the grinding
law of necessity, projected by Mr. Malthus. We might never reach the
philosophic temper of the inhabitants of modern Greece and Turkey in
this respect. Many little things might happen to interrupt our progress,
if we were put into ever so fair a train. For instance, the men might
perhaps be talked over by the parson, and their understandings being
convinced by the geometrical and arithmetical ratios, or at least so far
puzzled, that they would have nothing to say for themselves, they might
prepare to submit to their fate with a tolerable grace. But I am afraid
that the women might prove refractory. They never will hearken to
reason, and are much more governed by their feelings than by
calculations. While the husband was instructing his wife in the
principles of population, she might probably answer that “she did not
see why her children should starve, when the squire’s lady or the
parson’s lady kept half a dozen lap-dogs, and that it was but the other
day, that being at the hall, or the parsonage-house, she heard Miss
declare that not one of the brood that were just littered should be
drowned—It was _so inhuman_ to kill the poor little things—Surely the
children of the poor are as good as puppy-dogs! Was it not a week ago
that the rector had a new pack of terriers sent down, and did I not hear
the squire swear a tremendous oath, that he would have Mr. Such-a-one’s
fine hunter, if it cost him a hundred guineas? Half that sum would save
us from ruin.”—After this curtain-lecture, I conceive that the husband
might begin to doubt the force of the demonstrations he had read and
heard, and the next time his clerical monitor came, might pluck up
courage to question the matter with him; and as we of the male sex,
though dull of apprehension, are not slow at taking a hint, and can draw
tough inferences from it, it is not impossible but the parson might be
_gravelled_. In consequence of these accidents happening more than once,
it would be buzzed about that the laws of God and nature, on which so
many families had been doomed to starve, were not so clear as had been
pretended. This would soon get wind amongst the mob: and at the next
grand procession of the Penitents of famine, headed by Mr. Malthus in
person, some discontented man of talents, who could not bear the
distresses of others with the fortitude of a man and the resignation of
a Christian, might undertake to question Mr. Malthus, whether the laws
of nature or of God, to which he had piously sacrificed so many victims,
signified any thing more than the limited extent of the earth, and the
natural impossibility of providing for more than a limited number of
human beings; and whether those laws could be justly put in force, to
the very letter, while the actual produce of the earth, by being better
husbanded, or more equally distributed, or given to men and not to
beasts, might maintain in comfort double the number that actually
existed, and who, not daring to demand a _fair_ proportion of the
produce of their labour, humbly crave charity, and are refused out of
regard to the interests of justice and humanity. Our philosopher, at
this critical juncture not being able to bring into the compass of a few
words all the history, metaphysics, morality, and divinity, or all the
intricacies, subtleties, and callous equivocations contained in his
quarto volume, might hesitate and be confounded—his own feelings and
prejudices might add to his perplexity—his interrogator might persist in
his question—the mob might become impatient for an answer, and not
finding one to their minds, might proceed to extremities. Our
unfortunate Essayist (who by that time would have become a bishop) might
be ordered to the lamp-post, and his book committed to the flames,—I
tremble to think of what would follow:—the poor-laws would be again
renewed, and the poor no longer doomed to starve by the laws of God and
nature! Some such, I apprehend, might be the consequences of attempting
to enforce the abolition of the poor-laws, the extinction of private
charity, and of instructing the poor in their metaphysical rights.’
QUERIES RELATING TO THE ESSAY ON POPULATION
Query 1. Whether the real source of Mr. Malthus’s Essay is not to be
found in a work published in the year 1761, entitled, ‘Various Prospects
of Mankind,’ by a Scotchman of the name of Wallace? Or whether this
writer has not both stated the principle of the disproportion between
the unlimited power of increase in population, and the limited power of
increase in the means of subsistence, which principle is the
corner-stone of the Essay; and whether he has not drawn the very same
inference from it that Mr. Malthus has done, viz. that vice and misery
are necessary to keep population down to the level of the means of
subsistence?
2. Whether the chapter in Wallace, written expressly to prove these two
points (or in other words, to shew that the principle of population is
necessarily incompatible with any great degree of improvement in
government or morals) does not completely anticipate Mr. Malthus’s work,
both in its principle and its conclusion?
3. Whether the idea of an arithmetical and geometrical series by which
Mr. Malthus has been thought to have furnished the precise rule or
_calculus_ of the disproportion between food and population, is not,
strictly speaking, inapplicable to the subject; inasmuch as in new and
lately occupied countries, the quantity of food may be made to increase
nearly in the same proportion as population, and in all old and well
cultivated countries must be stationary, or nearly so? Whether,
therefore, this mode of viewing the subject has not tended as much to
embarrass as to illustrate the question, and to divert the mind from the
real source of the only necessary distinction between food and
population, namely, the want of sufficient room for the former to grow
in; a grain of corn, as long as it has room to increase and multiply, in
fact propagating its species much faster even than a man?
4. Whether the argument borrowed from Wallace, and constituting the
chief scope and tenor of the first edition of the Essay, which professed
to overturn all schemes of human perfectibility and Utopian forms of
government from the sole principle of population, does not involve a
plain contradiction;—both these authors, first of all, supposing or
taking for granted a state of society in which the most perfect order,
wisdom, virtue, and happiness shall prevail, and then endeavouring to
shew that all these advantages would only hasten their own ruin, and end
in famine, confusion, and unexampled wretchedness, in consequence of
taking away the only possible checks to population, _vice_ and _misery_?
Whether this objection does not suppose mankind in a state of the most
perfect reason, to be utterly blind to the consequences of the
unrestrained indulgence of their appetites, and with the most perfect
wisdom and virtue regulating all their actions, not to have the
slightest command over their animal passions? There is nothing in any of
the visionary schemes of human perfection so idle as this objection
brought against them, which has no more to do with the reasonings of
Godwin, Condorcet, &c. (against which Mr. Malthus’s first Essay was
directed) than with the prophecies of the Millennium!
5. Whether, in order to give some colour of plausibility to his
argument, and to prove that the highest conceivable degree of wisdom and
virtue could be of no avail in keeping down the principle of population,
Mr. Malthus did not at first set out with representing this principle,
to wit, the impulse to propagate the species, as a law of the same order
and cogency as that of satisfying the cravings of hunger; so that reason
having no power over it, vice and misery must be the necessary
consequences, and only possible checks to population?
6. Whether this original view of the subject did not unavoidably lead to
the most extravagant conclusions, not only by representing the total
removal of all vice and misery as the greatest evil that could happen to
the world, but (what is of more consequence than this speculative
paradox) by throwing a suspicion and a stigma on all subordinate
improvements or plans of reform, as so many clauses or sections of the
same general principle? Whether the quantity of vice and misery
necessary to keep population down to the level of the means of
subsistence, being left quite undetermined by the author, the old
barriers between vice and virtue, good and evil, were not broken down,
and a perfect latitude of choice allowed between forms of government and
modes of society, according to the temper of the times, or the taste of
individuals; only that vice and misery being always the _safe side_, the
presumption would naturally be in favour of the most barbarous,
ignorant, enslaved, and profligate? Whether the stumbling-block thus
thrown in the way of those who aimed at any amendment in social
institutions, does not obviously account for the alarm and opposition
which Mr. Malthus’s work excited on the one hand, and for the cordiality
and triumph with which it was hailed on the other?
7. Whether this view of the question, which is all in which the Essay
differs fundamentally from the received and less startling notions on
the subject, is not palpably, and by the author’s subsequent confession,
false, sophistical, and unfounded?
8. Whether the additional principle of _moral restraint_, inserted in
the second and following editions of the Essay as one effectual, and as
the only desirable means of checking population, does not at once
overturn all the paradoxical conclusions of the author respecting the
state of man in society, and whether nearly all these conclusions do not
still stand in Mr. Malthus’s work as they originally stood, as false in
fact as they are inconsistent in reasoning? Whether, indeed, it was
likely, that Mr. Malthus would give up the sweeping conclusions of his
first Essay, the fruits of his industry and the pledges of his success,
without great reluctance; or in such a manner as not to leave the
general plan of his work full of contradictions and almost
unintelligible?
9. Whether, for example, in treating of the durability of a perfect form
of government, Mr. Malthus has not ‘sicklied over the subject with the
same pale and jaundiced cast of thought,’ by supposing vice and misery
to be the only effectual checks to population; and in his tenacity on
this his old and favourite doctrine, whether he has not formally
challenged his opponents to point out any other, ‘except indeed’ (he
adds, recollecting himself) ‘moral restraint,’ which however he
considers as of no effect at all?
10. Whether, consistently with this verbal acknowledgment and virtual
rejection of the influence of moral causes, the general tendency of Mr.
M.’s system is not to represent the actual state of man in society as
nothing better than a blind struggle between vice, misery, and the
principle of population, the effects of which are just as mechanical as
the ebbing and flowing of the tide, and to bury all other principles,
all knowledge, or virtue, or liberty, under a heap of misapplied facts?
11. Whether, instead of accounting for the different degrees of
happiness, plenty, populousness, &c. in different countries, or in the
same country at different periods, from good or bad government, from the
vicissitudes of manners, civilization, and knowledge, according to the
common prejudice, Mr. Malthus does not expressly and repeatedly declare
that political institutions are but as the dust in the balance compared
with the inevitable consequences of the principle of population; and
whether he does not treat with the utmost contempt all those, who not
being in the secret of ‘the grinding law of necessity,’ had before his
time superficially concluded that moral, political, religious, and other
positive causes were of considerable weight in determining the happiness
or misery of mankind? It were to be wished that the author, instead of
tampering with his subject, and alternately holding out concessions, and
then recalling them, had made one bold and honest effort to get rid of
the bewildering effects of his original system, by affording his readers
some clue to determine, both in what manner and to what extent other
causes, independent of the principle of population, actually combine
with that principle (no longer pretended to be absolute and
uncontroulable) to vary the face of nature and society, under the same
general law, and had not left this most important _desideratum_ in his
work, to be apocryphally supplied by the ingenuity and zeal of his
apologists?
12. Whether Mr. Malthus does not uniformly discourage every plan for
extending the limits of population, and consequently the sphere of human
enjoyment, either by cultivating new tracts of soil, or improving the
old ones, by repeating on all occasions the same stale, senseless
objection, that, _after all_, the principle of population will press as
much as ever on the means of subsistence; or in other words, that though
the means of subsistence and comfort will be increased, there will be a
proportionable increase in the number of those who are to partake of it?
Or whether Mr. Malthus’s panic fear on this subject has not subsided
into an equally unphilosophical indifference?
13. Whether the principle of moral restraint, formerly recognized in Mr.
Malthus’s latter writings, and in reality turning all his paradoxes into
mere impertinence, does not remain a dead letter, which he never calls
into action, except for the single purpose of torturing the poor under
pretence of reforming their morals?
14. Whether the avowed basis of the author’s system on the poor-laws, is
not the following:—that by the laws of God and nature, the rich have a
right to starve the poor whenever they (the poor) cannot maintain
themselves; and whether the deliberate sophistry by which this right is
attempted to be made out, is not as gross an insult on the understanding
as on the feelings of the public? Or whether this reasoning does not
consist in a trite truism and a wilful contradiction; the truism being,
that whenever the earth cannot maintain all its inhabitants, that then,
by the laws of God and nature, or the physical constitution of things,
some of them must perish; and the contradiction being, that the right of
the rich to withhold a morsel of bread from the poor, while they
themselves roll in abundance, is a law of God and nature, founded on the
same physical necessity or absolute deficiency in the means of
subsistence?
15. Whether the commentators on the Essay have not fallen into the same
unwarrantable mode of reasoning, by confounding the real funds for the
maintenance of labour, _i.e._ the actual produce of the soil, with the
scanty pittance allowed out of it for the maintenance of the labourer
(after the demands of luxury and idleness are satisfied) by the
positive, varying laws of every country, or by the caprice of
individuals?
16. Whether these two things are not fundamentally distinct in
themselves, and ought not to be kept so, in a question of such
importance, as the right of the rich to starve the poor by system?
17. Whether Mr. Malthus has not been too much disposed to consider the
rich as a sort of Gods upon earth, who were merely employed in
distributing the goods of nature and fortune among the poor, who
themselves neither ate nor drank, ‘neither married nor were given in
marriage,’ and consequently were altogether unconcerned in the limited
extent of the means of subsistence, and the unlimited increase of
population?
18. Lastly, whether the whole of the reverend author’s management of the
principle of population and of the necessity of moral restraint, does
not seem to have been copied from the prudent Friar’s advice in Chaucer?
‘Beware therefore with lordes for to play,
Singeth Placebo:—
To a poor man men should his vices tell,
But not to a lord, though he should go to hell.’
END OF POLITICAL ESSAYS
ADVERTISEMENT AND BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL NOTES
FROM
THE ELOQUENCE OF THE BRITISH SENATE
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
This work was published in two 8vo volumes in 1807 with the following
title-page: ‘The Eloquence of the British Senate; or, Select Specimens
from the Speeches of the most Distinguished Parliamentary Speakers. From
the beginning of the Reign of Charles I. to the Present Time. With
Notes, Biographical, Critical, and Explanatory. Two Volumes. London:
Printed for Thomas Ostell, No. 3, Ave Maria Lane, Ludgate St. 1807.’ In
the following year the work appeared with another title-page, which
contains the same title, and proceeds ‘By William Hazlitt. In Two
Volumes. London: Printed for J. Murray, Fleet-Street, and J. Harding,
St. James’s-Street, London; and A. Constable and Co., Edinburgh. 1808.’
ADVERTISEMENT
This collection took its rise from a wish which the compiler had
sometimes felt, in hearing the praises of the celebrated orators of
former times, to know what figure they would have made by the side of
those of our own times, with whose productions we are better acquainted.
For instance, in reading Burke, I should have been glad to have had the
speeches of Lord Chatham at hand, to compare them; and I have had the
same curiosity to know, whether Walpole had any thing like the dexterity
and plausibility of Pitt. As there are probably other readers, who may
have felt the same kind of curiosity, I thought I could not employ my
time better than in attempting to gratify it. Besides, it is no more
than a piece of justice due to the _mighty dead_. It is but right we
should know what we owe to them, and how far we have improved upon, or
fallen short of them. Who could not give almost any thing to have seen
Garrick, and Betterton, and Quin? Our politicians are almost as
short-lived a race as our players, ‘who strut and fret an hour upon the
stage, and then are heard no more.’ The event, and the hero of the
moment, engross all our attention, and in the _vastness_ of our present
views, we entirely overlook the past. Those celebrated men of the last
age, the Walpoles, the Pulteneys, the Pelhams, the Harleys, the
Townshends, and the Norths, who filled the columns of the newspapers
with their speeches, and every pot-house with their fame, who were the
mouthpieces of their party, nothing but perpetual smoke and bounce,
incessant volley without let or intermission, who were the wisdom of the
wise, and the strength of the strong, whose praises were inscribed on
every window-shutter or brick-wall, or floated through the busy air,
upborne by the shouts and huzzas of a giddy multitude,—all of them are
now silent and forgotten; all that remains of them is consigned to
oblivion in the musty records of Parliament, or lives only in the shadow
of a name. I wished therefore to bring them on the stage once more, and
drag them out of that obscurity, from which it is now impossible to
redeem their _fellow-actors_. I was uneasy till I had made the
monumental pile of octavos and folios, ‘wherein I saw them quietly
inurned, open its ponderous and marble jaws,’ and ‘set the imprisoned
wranglers free again.’ It is possible that some of that numerous race of
orators, who have sprung up within the last ten years, to whom I should
certainly have first paid my compliments, may not be satisfied with the
space allotted them in these volumes. But I cannot help it. My object
was to revive what was forgotten, and embody what was permanent; and not
to echo the loquacious babblings of these accomplished persons, who, if
all their words were written in a book, the world would not contain
them. Besides, living speakers may, and are in the habit of printing
their own speeches. Or even if this were not the case, there is no
danger, while they have breath and lungs left, that they will ever
suffer the public to be at a loss for daily specimens of their polished
eloquence and profound wisdom.
There were some other objects to be attended to in making this
collection, as well as the style of different speakers. I wished to make
it a history, as far as I could, of the progress of the language, of the
state of parties at different periods, of the most interesting debates,
and in short, an abridged parliamentary history for the time. It was
necessary that it should serve as a common-place book of all the
principal topics, of the _pros_ and _cons_ of the different questions,
that may be brought into dispute. If, however, this work has the effect
which I intend it to have, it will rather serve to put a stop to that
vice of _much speaking_, which is the fashion of the present day, by
shewing our forward disputants how little new is to be said on any of
these questions, than offer a temptation to their vanity to enrich
themselves out of the spoils of others. I have also endeavoured to
gratify the reader’s curiosity, by sometimes giving the speeches of men
who were not celebrated for their eloquence, but for other things; as
Cromwell, for example. If, therefore, any one expects to find nothing
but eloquent speeches in these volumes, he will certainly be
disappointed. A very small volume indeed, would contain all the recorded
eloquence of both houses of parliament.
As to the notes and criticisms, which accompany the speeches, I am aware
that they are too long and frequent for a work of this nature. If,
however, the reader should not be of opinion that ‘the things themselves
are neither new nor rare,’ he is at liberty to apply the next line of
the satire to them,—he may naturally enough wonder, ‘how the devil they
got there.’ The characters of Chatham, Burke, Fox, and Pitt, are those
which are the most laboured. As to the first of these, I am not so
certain. It was written in the heat of the first impression which his
speeches made upon me: and perhaps the first impression is a fair test
of the effect they must produce on those who heard them.—But farther I
will not be answerable for it. As to the opinions I have expressed of
the three last speakers, they are at least my settled opinions, and I
believe I shall not easily change them. In the selections from Burke, I
have followed the advice of friends in giving a whole speech, whereas I
ought to have given only extracts.
For the bias which may sometimes appear in this work, I shall only
apologize by referring the impartial reader to the different characters
of Fox and Burke. These will, I think, shew, that whatever my prejudices
may be, I am not much disposed to be blinded by them.
BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL NOTES
KING CHARLES I.—Came to the crown in 1625, and was beheaded in 1648. The
following is his speech from the throne on meeting his first parliament.
It contains nothing very remarkable, but may serve as a specimen of the
stile that was in use at the time. The chief subject of the speech is
the war with Spain, in which the country was then engaged. There is also
an allusion to the plague, which at that time prevailed in London.
SIR EDWARD COKE, (_Lord Chief Justice, and author of the Institutes_,)
was born in 1550, and died in 1634. He was removed from his office in
1616, and first joined the popular side in parliament in 1621. There is
the same quaintness and pithiness in the other speeches which are given
of this celebrated lawyer, that will be found in the following one. It
is a little remarkable, that almost all the abuses of expenditure, and
heads of œconomical reform, which were the objects of Mr. Burke’s famous
bill, are here distinctly enumerated.
SIR ROBERT COTTON, (_the famous Antiquary_,) was born in 1570, and died
1631. He was made a baronet by James I. and was one of the opposition
party in the time of his successor. The speech which follows was
occasioned by some offence taken by the court at the severe reflections
cast upon the duke of Buckingham in the house of commons. It is, as one
might expect, learned, full of facts and authorities, containing matters
which no doubt were thought to be of great weight and moment.
GEORGE VILLIERS, (_Created Duke of Buckingham by James I._,) was born
1592, and was assassinated by Felton in 1628. It is said that he had
originally but an indifferent education. Perhaps it was owing to this
that there is more ease and vivacity, and less pedantry, in the stile of
his speeches, than in those of most of his contemporaries. We can hardly
account for it from his having been privately tutored by king James the
First. The subject of the following speech was the war with Spain, and
recovery of the Palatinate.
DR. JOHN WILLIAMS, (_Keeper of the Great Seal_, _Bishop of Lincoln_,
_and afterwards Archbishop of York_,) was born in Caernarvonshire in
Wales in 1582, and died in 1650. He preached James the First’s funeral
sermon, in which he compared him to king Solomon. How well he was
qualified for this courtly task may be seen by the following specimen.
The following speech I have thought worth preserving, as it pretty
clearly shews the relation which at this time was understood to subsist,
and the tone that prevailed, between the king and his parliament.
SIR HENEAGE FINCH was recorder of London. I have given his speech on
being appointed speaker, as a curious instance of the flowery stile then
in vogue. It is full of far-fetched thoughts, and fulsome compliments.
JOHN SELDEN, (_The well-known Author of Table-Talk, and other works of
great learning_,) was born in 1584, and died in 1654. He was member at
different times for Great Bedwin, in Wiltshire, and Lancashire, and
through his whole life a strenuous oppositionist.
SIR DUDLEY DIGGES, born in 1583, was made master of the rolls in 1636,
and died in 1639. I have already given one or two specimens of the
pompous stile; but as the following extract soars to a still sublimer
pitch, I could not resolve to omit it. After a slight introduction to
the charge brought forward against the duke of Buckingham, his titles
were formally enumerated, and then Sir Dudley Digges proceeded.
MR. JOHN PYM, one of the great leaders of the republican party, was
member for Tavistock. He died in 1643. The subject of the speech is the
charge against the duke of Buckingham, of which he was one of the
managers. It certainly contains a great deal of good sense, strongly
expressed.
MR. WANDESFORD.—This long and closely reasoned speech about a
posset-drink, and sticking-plaister, applied by the duke of Buckingham
to James I. a little before his death, is a proof of the gravity with
which our ancestors could treat the meanest subjects, when they were
connected with serious consequences.
SIR DUDLEY CARLETON.—One may collect from the following speech of Sir
Dudley Carleton’s that he was a great traveller, and a very well-meaning
man. He was born 1573, and died 1631. Before his death he was created
Viscount Dorchester.
MR. CRESKELD.—If the thoughts in the following introduction to an
elaborate legal dissertation are conceits, they are nevertheless
ingenious and poetical conceits.
ROBERT RICH, (_Created Earl of Warwick, and Lord Rich of Leeze, by James
I._).—I have given the following speech on the right of the crown to
imprison the subject without any reason shewn, for its good sense and
logical acuteness.
FRANCIS ROUSE was a native of Cornwall. He represented Truro in the long
parliament, was one of the lay members of the assembly of divines, and
speaker of Barebone’s parliament, and died in 1659. His speech against a
Dr. Manwaring, who had written a flaming monarchical sermon, is so
remarkable for its fanatical absurdity, and the uncouthness of the
stile, that it certainly deserves a place in this collection, as a
curiosity.
SIR JOHN ELLIOTT.—The following is a noble instance of parliamentary
eloquence; for the strength and closeness of the reasoning, for the
clearness of the detail, for the earnestness of the stile, it is
admirable: it in some places reminds one strongly of the clear, plain,
convincing, irresistible appeals of Demosthenes to his hearers. There is
no affectation of wit, no studied ornament, no display of fancied
superiority; his whole heart and soul are in his subject, he is full of
it; his mind seems as it were to surround and penetrate every part of
it; nothing diverts him from his purpose, or interrupts the course of
his reasoning for a moment. The force and connection of his ideas give
vehemence to his expressions, and he convinces others, because he is
thoroughly impressed with the truth of his own opinions. A certain
political writer of the present day might be supposed to have borrowed
his _dogged_ stile from this speaker.
SIR BENJAMIN RUDYARD was member for Wilton. That which is here given is
by far the best speech of his extant. It might pass for the heads of one
of Burke’s speeches, without the ornaments and without the elegance. It
has all the good sense, and moral wisdom, only more plain and practical.
SIR ROBERT PHILIPS.—In this apparently unstudied address, we meet, for
the first time, with real warmth and eloquence.
This gentleman was not one of those who make speeches out of mere parade
and ostentation; he never spoke but when he was in earnest, nor indeed
till he was in a downright passion.
EDMUND WALLER (_The celebrated Poet_,) was born in 1605, and died in
1687. He was member for St. Ives. At first he was hostile to the court;
but he seems to have been very wavering and undecided in his political
opinions, and changed his party very often, according to his whim or
convenience. I do not think there is any thing in the following speech
very excellent, either for the matter or manner of it.
It would be hard to deny that the following speech is a good one, when
we know that it saved the author’s life. Indeed, nothing can be imagined
better calculated to soothe the resentment of the house of commons, or
flatter their pride, than the concluding part of this address. Not even
one of his own amorous heroes could fawn and cringe, and swear and
supplicate, and act a feigned submission, with more suppleness and
dexterity, to avert the mortal displeasure of some proud and offended
beauty, than Mr. Waller has here employed to appease the fury, and
insinuate himself once more into the good graces of his political
paramour, the house of commons. In this, however, he succeeded no
farther than to receive his life at her hands; which it seems he had
forfeited by conspiring to deliver up the city to the king.
LORD GEORGE DIGBY, (_Son of the first Earl of Bristol_,) was born in
1612, and died in 1676. He was member for Dorsetshire in the long
parliament. He at first opposed the court, but afterwards joined the
royal party, and was expelled.
SIR JOHN WRAY, (_Member for Lincolnshire_).—His speech is chiefly
remarkable for the great simplicity of the stile, and as an instance of
the manner in which an honest country gentleman, without much wit or
eloquence, but with some pretensions to both, might be supposed to
express himself at this period.
THOMAS WENTWORTH, (_Earl of Strafford_,) was a gentleman of an ancient
family in Yorkshire, and created a peer by Charles I. He at first
opposed the court with great virulence and ability; but afterwards
became connected with it, and recommended some of the most obnoxious
measures. After a bill of attainder was passed against him, at the
instigation of the commons, the king refused for a long time to give his
assent to it, till at last lord Strafford himself wrote to advise him to
comply, which he did with great reluctance. He was beheaded 1641.
Whatever were his faults, he was a man of a fine understanding, and an
heroic spirit; and undoubtedly a great man. What follows is the
conclusion of his last defence before the house of lords.
DR. JOSEPH HALL, (_Bishop of Exeter and afterwards of Norwich_,) was
born in 1574, and died 1656. He suffered a good deal from the Puritans.
He is celebrated, without much reason, for the fineness of his writings.
This speech has more feeling in it than the Bishop generally discovers.
It shews that ‘passion makes men eloquent.’
BULSTRODE WHITLOCKE, (_Member for Great Marlow, Buckinghamshire_,) was
born in 1605, and died in 1676. In 1653 he was sent ambassador to
Sweden. He was a man of great learning, and he appears also to have
possessed moderation and good sense. He was the author of the Memorials.
The following speech displays so much knowledge, and such deep research
into the imperfect and obscure parts of English history, that though it
is long, and from the nature of the subject somewhat uninteresting, I
thought it right to let it stand, as a monument of legal learning in the
17th century. A country may be as different from itself, at different
times, as one country is from another; and one object that I have
chiefly had in view in this work, has been to select such examples as
might serve to mark the successive changes that have taken place in the
minds and characters of Englishmen within the last 200 years.
The distinctive character of the period of which we are now speaking
was, I think, that men’s minds were stored with facts and images, almost
to excess; there was a tenacity and firmness in them that kept fast hold
of the impressions of things as they were first stamped upon the mind;
and ‘their ideas seemed to lie like substances in the brain.’ Facts and
feelings went hand in hand; the one naturally implied the other; and our
ideas, not yet exorcised and squeezed and tortured out of their natural
objects, into a subtle essence of pure intellect, did not fly about like
ghosts without a body, tossed up and down, or upborne only by the
ELEGANT FORMS of words, through the _vacuum_ of abstract reasoning, and
sentimental refinement. The understanding was invigorated and nourished
with its natural and proper food, the knowledge of things without it;
and was not left, like an empty stomach, to prey upon itself, or starve
on the meagre scraps of an artificial logic, or windy impertinence of
ingenuity self-begotten. What a difference between the grave, clear,
solid, laborious stile of the speech here given, and the crude
metaphysics, false glitter, and trifling witticism of a modern legal
oration! The truth is, that the affectation of philosophy and fine taste
has spoiled every thing; and instead of the honest seriousness and
simplicity of old English reasoning in law, in politics, in morality, in
all the grave concerns of life, we have nothing left but a mixed species
of bastard sophistry, got between ignorance and vanity, and generating
nothing.
WILLIAM LENTHALL, (_An eminent Lawyer_, _and Speaker of the Long
Parliament_,) was member for Woodstock. He was born 1591, and died 1662.
This high-flown address to General Fairfax, is a model of the adulatory
stile. Surely a great man does not stand in need of so much praise.
OLIVER CROMWELL, (_Member for Cambridge_, _born 1599_, _died 1658_).—I
have given the following speeches of his, to shew that he was not so bad
a speaker as is generally imagined. The world will never (if they can
help it) allow one man more than one excellence; and if he possesses any
one quality in the highest degree, they then, either to excite a foolish
wonder, or to gratify a lurking vanity, endeavour to find out that he is
as much below the rest of mankind in every thing else. Thus it has been
the fashion to suppose, because Cromwell was a great general and
statesman, that therefore he could not utter a sentence that was
intelligible, or that had the least connection, or even common sense in
it. But this is not the fact. His speeches, though not remarkable either
for their elegance or clearness, are not remarkable for the contrary
qualities. They are pithy and sententious; containing many examples of
strong practical reason, (not indeed of that kind which is satisfied
with itself, and supplies the place of action) but always closely
linked, and serving as a prelude to action. His observations are those
of a man who does not rely entirely on words, and has some other
resource left him besides; but who is neither unwilling nor unable to
employ them, when they are necessary to his purpose. If they do not
convey any adequate idea of his great abilities, they contain nothing
from which one might infer the contrary. They are just such speeches as
a man must make with his hand upon his sword, and who appeals to that as
the best decider of controversies. They are full of bustle and
impatience, and always go directly to the point in debate, without
preparation or circumlocution.
JOHN THURLOE, (_Author of the State Papers_, _and confidential Secretary
to Cromwell_,) was born in 1616, and died in 1668. The following speech
of his is interesting, as it shews the temper of the times; it is shrewd
and vulgar enough.
RICHARD CROMWELL, succeeded his father in the Protectorate; but soon
after, not being able to retain the government in his hands, he
resigned, and went abroad. He died 1712. It is curious to have something
of a man who, from the weakness either of his understanding or passions,
tamely lost a kingdom which his father had gained.
CHARLES II. was born 1630, and died 1685. This prince is justly
celebrated for his understanding and wit. There is, however, nothing
remarkable in his speeches to parliament, of which the following is a
very fair specimen.
EDWARD HYDE, (_Earl of Clarendon_, _and Lord Chancellor of England_,)
was born in 1608, and died abroad in 1673. He was a steady adherent to
the royal party, but in 1667 he was accused of treason, and obliged to
withdraw secretly into France. He was a man of great abilities, and
wrote the well-known history of the Rebellion. His daughter was married
to James II.
GEORGE VILLIERS, (_Second Duke of Buckingham_,)—Born 1627, died 1688. He
is famous for having written the satirical play of the Rehearsal. His
speech at a grave conference between the lords and commons, to decide
the limits of the judicial authority of the former, is very like what
one might expect from him. He seems chiefly anxious to avoid the
imputation of knowing or caring more about the matter than became a
gentleman, and a wit; at the same time he talks very well about it.
LORD BRISTOL.—I have given the following Speech, because it discovers a
quaint sort of familiar common sense.
HENEAGE FINCH, (_First Earl of Nottingham_, _Son of Sir Heneage Finch_,)
was born 1621, and died 1682. He was member for Oxford, and in 1670
appointed attorney general, and afterwards lord keeper and lord
chancellor. In this latter office he succeeded Lord Clarendon. He was
rather an elegant speaker.
SIR LEOLINE JENKINS, (_An eminent Civilian and Statesman_,) was born in
Glamorganshire, in 1623, and died 1685. He was one of the
representatives of the University of Oxford, and principal of Jesus
College.
LORD WILLIAM RUSSELL, (_Who is generally looked upon as one of the great
martyrs of English liberty_,) was born 1641, and beheaded 1683, on the
same charge of treason on which Algernon Sidney was also condemned to
suffer death.
EARL OF CAERNARVON.—The account of this speech is singular enough.
‘Among the speakers on this occasion was the earl of Caernarvon, who is
said never to have spoken before; but having been heated with wine, and
rallied by the duke of Buckingham on his never speaking, he said he
would speak that very afternoon; and this having produced some wager
between them, he went into the house with a resolution to speak on any
subject that should offer itself. He accordingly stood up, and delivered
himself to the following effect:’
ANTHONY ASHLEY COOPER was born at Winborn, in Dorsetshire, in 1621, and
died 1683. In 1640, he was chosen member for Tewksbury. In 1672, he was
created earl of Shaftesbury, and appointed lord chancellor. This office
he did not long retain, as he was a man of fiery passions, turbulent,
violent, and self-willed; and was constantly opposing the schemes and
measures of whatever party he was connected with. He is the person
described by Dryden under the character of Achitophel. There is an
instance recorded of his great sagacity, which carries the _prophetic
spirit_ of common sense as far as it can go. It is said that he had been
to dine with lady Clarendon and her daughter, who was at that time
privately married to the duke of York; and as he returned home with
another nobleman who had accompanied him, he suddenly turned to him, and
said, ‘Depend upon it, the duke has married Hyde’s daughter.’ His
companion could not comprehend what he meant; but on explaining himself,
he said, ‘Her mother behaved to her with an attention and a marked
respect, that is impossible to account for in any other way; and I am
sure of it.’ This shortly afterwards proved to be the case. The
celebrated author of The Characteristics was his grandson.
HENRY BOOTH, (_Lord Delamere_, _and afterwards created Earl of
Warrington_,) was member for Cheshire in the time of Charles II. and a
great opposer of the court, and popery. He was committed to the Tower
for high-treason, by James II. but was acquitted. He died 1694. There is
a collection of his speeches in one volume, octavo. That which I have
given is not, perhaps, the best; but there is an air of homely interest
in it, a mixture of local and personal feeling, which makes it the most
amusing. The independent country gentleman, the justice of the peace,
the _custos rotulorum_, (to which latter office he appears to have been
as much attached as justice Shallow himself could be,) his own personal
disinterestedness, his political zeal, and his great friendship for sir
Thomas Manwaring, who seems to have been a man of much importance in his
time, though now totally forgotten, are all brought together in a way
that I like exceedingly; and I can assure the reader, that if I do not
present him with a good collection, by following my own inclination in
taking those speeches which I like myself, and merely because I like
them, I should, however, make a much worse in any other way.
JOHN, LORD SOMERS, was born 1652, and died 1710. He was member for
Worcester in the convention parliament, where he was appointed to manage
the conference with the lords, on the abdication of king James, and in
1697 was made lord chancellor. He was one of the principal persons
employed in bringing about the revolution. From this and the following
speeches two things appear to me tolerably clear, in opposition to the
theories both of Mr. Burke and Dr. Price on the subject; that the great
constitutional leaders who were concerned in producing this event,
believed first, that the hereditary right to the crown was not absolute,
but conditional; or that there was an original fundamental compact
between the king and people, the terms of which the former was bound to
fulfil to make good his title; secondly, that so long as these
conditions were complied with, the people were bound to maintain their
allegiance to the lawful successor, and not left at liberty to choose
whom they pleased, having no other law to govern them in their choice
than their own will, or fancy, or sense of convenience. There was indeed
an estate of inheritance, but then this was tied down and limited by
certain conditions, which, if not adhered to, the estate became lapsed
and forfeited. There was no question as the case stood, either of
sovereign absolute power, or of natural rights: the rights and duties of
both parties were defined and circumscribed by a constitution and order
of things already established, and which could not be infringed on
either side with impunity: that is, they were exactly in the state of
all contracting parties, neither of them independent, but each having a
check or control over the other: the one had no right to enforce his
claim if he did not perform what was _in the agreement_, and the other
party, so long as this was done, could not be _off their bargain_. The
king could not therefore be said to hold his crown ‘in contempt of the
people,’ for both were equally responsible and bound to one another, and
both stood equally in awe of one another, or of the _law_. But in case
of any difference on this head, the right to decide must of course
belong to those who had the power; for by the very nature of the thing
there is nothing to restrain those who have power in their hands from
exercising it, but the sense of right and wrong; and where they think
they have a right to act, what is there to hinder them from acting in
vindication of what they conceive to be their right? I am not here
entering into the abstract question of government, nor do I pretend to
say that this is the true law and constitution of England; I am only
stating what was understood to be so by the prime movers and abettors of
the revolution of 1688.
DANIEL FINCH, (_Second Earl of Nottingham_,) was born 1647, and died
1730. He was all his life an active politician, without being devoted to
any party. He seems to have gone just as far as his principles would
carry him, and no farther; and therefore often stood still in his
political career.
SIR ROBERT HOWARD, (_Who is known as a Political and Dramatic Writer_,)
was the son of the earl of Berkshire, knighted at the restoration. He
died about 1700.
WILLIAM III. (_Prince of Orange_,) was born at the Hague in 1650. He was
the son of William, prince of Orange, and Henrietta, daughter of king
Charles I. He married the daughter of James II.; and in consequence of
the arbitrary conduct of that monarch, was invited over in 1688, to take
possession of the crown in his stead. He died 1702, by a fall from his
horse. He was a man of great abilities, both as a statesman and general.
SIR CHARLES SEDLEY, (_One of the Wits and Poets of the Court of Charles
II._,) was born about 1639, and died 1701. His daughter had been
mistress to James II. who made her countess of Dorchester; so that, on
being asked why he was so great a favourer of the revolution, he
replied, ‘From a principle of gratitude: for since his majesty has made
my daughter a countess, it is fit I should do all I can to make his
daughter a queen.’
SIR JOHN KNIGHT, (_Member for Bristol_).—This worthy citizen, (of whom I
am sorry I can learn no more than his title, and the place which he
represented,) shall make his appearance, and at full length, though he
should be received with as dreadful a storm of criticism, as that which
he describes in the outset of his speech. He is a true Englishman, a
perfect islander. He seems to have as thorough a hatred for the
continent, and all its inhabitants, as if he had been first swaddled in
the leaky hold of a merchantman, or had crawled out of the mud of the
Bristol channel. He is not merely warm, he perfectly _reeks_ with
patriotism, and antipathy to all foreigners. For the last hundred years,
we have only been working on this model, and I do not see that we can
get much beyond it. We have, it is true, refined the stile, filled up
the outlines, added elegance to fury, and expanded our prejudices into
systems of philosophy. But we have added nothing to the stock. The
design and principles remain the same; and they are unalterable. The
pattern is closely copied from human nature. Indeed, I do not know
whether the best examples of modern declamation on this subject, will be
found to be much better than awkward affectation, and laboured
extravagance, in which the writers scarcely seem to believe themselves,
if we compare them with the spirit, the natural expression, the force,
and broad decided manner of this great master!
For my own part, I confess I like the blunt, uncouth, _bear-garden_
stile; the coarse familiarity, and virulent abuse of this honest knight,
better than the studied elegance of modern invective. The stile is
suited to the subject. Every thing is natural and sincere, and warm from
the heart. Here are no fine-spun theories, no affected rancour, no
attempts to bind fast the spell of ignorance, by the calling in of
‘metaphysical aid,’ or to make use of the ice of philosophy as a
burning-glass to inflame the violence of the passions. Downright
passion, unconquerable prejudice, and unaffected enthusiasm, are always
justifiable; they follow a blind, but sure instinct; they flow from a
real cause; they are uniform and consistent with themselves; and their
mischiefs, whatever they are, have certain limits, may be calculated
upon, and provided against. But fine reasoning, and gross feelings, do
not accord well together. We may apply to them what has been said of
love, _non bene conveniunt, nec in una sede morantur majestas et amor_.
It is an unnatural union, which can produce nothing but distortion. We
are not at present hurried away by the honest ebullitions of resentment,
or blind zeal, but are in that state described by Shakespeare, in which
‘reason panders will.’ No one is offended at the ravings, the fierce
gestures of a madman; but what should we think of a man who affected to
start, to foam at the mouth, and feigned himself mad, only to have an
opportunity for executing the most mischievous purposes? We are not
surprised to see poisonous weeds growing in a wilderness; but who would
think of transplanting them into a cultivated garden? I am therefore
glad to take refuge from the mechanic, cold-blooded fury, and mercenary
malice of pretended patriotism, in the honest eloquence, ‘the downright
violence and storm of passion’ of this real enthusiast.
LORD BELHAVEN. The following Speech is inserted in the debates of this
period. Though it does not come regularly within the plan of this
collection, yet I thought I might be allowed to give it for the sake of
diversifying the stile of the work, and as a curious record of national
feeling. As to the stile, ‘it has the melancholy madness of poetry,
without the inspiration.’ It has all the forms of eloquence, but not all
the power; and is an excellent instance to shew how far mere _manner_
will go. There can be little doubt but that this oration must have
produced a very great effect; and yet there is nothing in it which any
man might not say who was willing to indulge in the same strain of
academic description. But it adopts the language of imagination, mimics
her voice and gestures, conforms to her style by a continued profusion
of figure and personification, and is full of that eloquence which
consists in telling your mind freely, and which carries the hearer along
with it, because you never seem to doubt for a moment of his sympathy,
or that he does not take as great an interest in the question as you do.
There is no captious reserve, no surly independence, no affected
indifference, no fear of committing yourself, or exposing yourself to
ridicule by giving a loose to your feelings; but every thing seems
spoken with a full heart, sensible of the value of the cause it
espouses, and only fearful of failing in expressions of zeal towards it,
or in the respect that is due to it. Perhaps, what I have here stated
may serve to point out the characteristic difference between the
eloquence of the English and the French. The latter avail themselves of
all the advantages that art and trick and adventitious ornament can
give; and they are chiefly anxious to produce an effect by the most
obvious means. If their thoughts are but fine, they do not care how
common they are: this is because they have more vanity than pride, and
are willing to be pleased at any rate. On the other hand, an
Englishman’s muse is generally the spleen. He is for defying others into
sympathy, and had rather incur their contempt than endeavour to gain
their good opinion by shewing a desire to please them. He likes to do
every thing in the most difficult way, and from a spirit of
contradiction. Accordingly, his eloquence (when it is forced from him)
is the best that can be, because it is of nature’s doing, and not his
own, and comes from him in spite of himself. However, there is a sort of
gallantry in eloquence as well as in love. To coquet with the muses, to
dally with the fair forms of speech, to be full of nothing but
apostrophes, interjections, interrogations, to be in raptures at the
sight of a capital letter, and to take care never to lose a fine thought
any more than a fine girl, for fear of putting a question, are the only
means by which a man without imagination can hope to be an orator; as it
is only by being a coxcomb, that a man who is not handsome can ever
think of pleasing the women! But to return from this digression to the
speech itself, it contains a good deal of warmth and animation, and if
the author had been a young man, would have done him credit.
GEORGE I. was the son of the Elector of Hanover, by Sophia,
grand-daughter of James I. He was born in 1660, and succeeded queen
Anne, in 1714. He died suddenly, abroad, in 1727. He talks of the throne
of his ancestors with a pious simplicity.
ROBERT HARLEY, (_Eldest Son of Sir Edward Harley_, _and afterwards Earl
of Oxford_,) was born 1661, and died 1724. His politics in the latter
part of the reign of queen Anne, rendered him obnoxious in the
succeeding reign; and in 1715, he was accused of high-treason, but was
at length acquitted. He was the friend of Swift.
SIR THOMAS HANMER, (_Member for Suffolk_,) was born in 1676; he was
chosen speaker of the house of commons in 1713, and died in 1746. He
published an edition of Shakespeare. He was a very respectable speaker.
The following address contains a sort of summary of the politics of the
day, and gathers up the ‘threads of shrewd and politic design’ that were
snapped short at the end of the preceding reign.
If this speech does not contain good sound English sense, I do not know
where we shall look for it.
SIR RICHARD STEELE was born at Dublin, though the year in which he was
born is not known, and died in 1729. He was member for Boroughbridge in
Yorkshire. I have made the following extract less for the sake of the
speech than the speaker; for I could not pass by the name of an author
to whom we owe two of the most delightful books that ever were written,
the Spectator and Tatler. As a party man he was a most furious Whig.
MR. (afterwards SIR) ROBERT WALPOLE was born at Houghton, in Norfolk, in
1674, and died 1745. In 1700, he was chosen member of parliament for
Lynn. In 1705, he was appointed secretary at war; and in 1709, treasurer
of the navy; but, on the change of ministers, he was voted guilty of
corruption, and expelled the house. The whig party strenuously supported
him; and he was re-elected for Lynn, though the election was declared
void. At the accession of George I. he was made paymaster of the forces;
but two years after he resigned, and joined the opposition. Another
change taking place in 1725, he took the lead in administration, being
chosen first lord of the treasury, and chancellor of the exchequer. He
maintained himself in this situation till 1742, when he resigned, and
was created earl of Oxford, with a pension of 4,000 _l._ a year.
We may form as good an idea of the talents of this celebrated man as a
speaker in the house of commons, from the following speech as from any
that he has left behind him. He may be considered as the first who (if
the similitude be not too low to be admitted, I confess nothing can be
lower) threw the house of commons into the form of a regular debating
society. In his time debate was organized; all the common-place topics
of political controversy were familiar in the mouths of both parties.
The combatants on each side, in this political warfare, were regularly
drawn up in opposition to each other, and had their several parts
assigned them with the greatest exactitude.
‘The popular harangue, the tart reply,
‘The logic, and the wisdom, and the wit,’
appeared in all their combined lustre. The effect of this system could
not be different from what it has turned out. The house of commons,
instead of being the representative and depository of the collective
sense of the nation, has become a theatre for wrangling disputants to
declaim in the scene of noisy impertinence and pedantic folly. An empty
shew of reason, a set of words has been substituted for the silent
operation of general feeling and good sense; and ministers referring
every thing to this flimsy standard have been no longer taken up in
planning wise measures, but in studying how to defend their blunders. It
has been usual to draw a sort of parallel between the person of whom we
are speaking, and the late Mr. Pitt. For this perhaps there is little
more foundation than the great length of their administrations, and
their general ability as leaders of the debates in parliament. If I were
disposed to make a comparison of this kind, I should attempt to describe
them by their differences rather than their resemblances. They had both
perhaps equal plausibility, equal facility, and equal presence of mind;
but it was of an entirely different kind, and arose from different
causes in each of them. Walpole’s manner was more natural and less
artificial; his resources were more the result of spontaneous vigour and
quickness of mind, and less the growth of cultivation and industry. If
the late minister was superior to his predecessor in office in logical
precision, in the comprehensive arrangement of his subject, and a
perfect acquaintance with the topics of common-place declamation, he was
certainly at the same time very much his inferior in acuteness of
understanding, in original observation, and knowledge of human nature,
and in lively, unexpected turns of thought. Pitt’s readiness was not
owing to the quickness or elasticity of his understanding, but to a
perfect self-command, a steadiness and inflexibility of mind, which
never lost sight of the knowledge which it had in its possession, nor
was ever distracted in the use of it. Nothing ever assumed a new shape
in passing through his mind: he recalled his ideas just as they were
originally impressed, and they neither received nor ever threw a
sparkling light on any subject with which he connected them, either by
felicity of combination, or ingenuity of argument. They were of that
loose, general, unconnected kind, as just to fill the places they were
brought out to occupy in the rank and file of an oration, and then
returned mechanically back to their several stations, to be ready to
appear again whenever they were called for. Walpole’s eloquence, on the
other hand, was less an affair of reminiscence, and more owing to
present invention. He seems to have spoken constantly on the spur of the
occasion; without pretending to exhaust his subject, he often put it in
a striking point of view; and the arguments into which he was led in
following the doublings and windings of a question, were such as do not
appear to have occurred to himself before nor to have been made use of
by others. When he had to obviate any objection, he did not do it so
much by ambiguity or evasion, as by immediately starting some other
difficulty on the opposite side of the question, which blunted the edge
of the former, and staggered the opinion of his hearers. The stile of
their speeches is also marked by the same differences as their mode of
reasoning. In the one you discover the ease and vivacity of the
gentleman, of the man of the world; in the other the studied correctness
of the scholar. The one has the variety, simplicity, and smartness of
conversation; the other has all the fulness, the pomp, the premeditated
involutions and measured periods of a book, but of a book not written in
the best stile. The one is more agreeable and insinuating; the other
more imposing and majestic. Not to spin out this comparison to an
unnecessary length I should think that Walpole was less completely armed
for entering the lists with his antagonists, but that his weapons were
keener, and more difficult to manage; that Pitt had more art, and
Walpole more strength and activity; that the display of controversial
dexterity was in Walpole more a trial of wit, and in Pitt more an affair
of science; that Walpole had more imagination, and Pitt more
understanding; if, indeed, any thing can entitle a man to the praise of
understanding, which is neither valuable, nor his own.
FRANCIS ATTERBURY, (_Bishop of Rochester_,) was born in 1662. His
eloquence brought him early into notice. His political principles were
very violent, and engaged him in several controversies. He assisted Dr.
Sacheverel in drawing up his defence. When the rebellion broke out in
1715, he and bishop Smalridge refused to sign the Declaration of the
bishops; and in 1722 he was apprehended and committed to the Tower, on
suspicion of being concerned in some plot to bring in the Pretender. He
was sentenced to be banished for life, and left the kingdom in 1723. He
died at Paris in 1732. He is now chiefly remembered as an elegant
writer, and as the intimate friend of Pope and Swift. The following is
the conclusion of his defence before the house of lords.
ALLEN (afterwards LORD) BATHURST, (_The Son of Sir Benjamin Bathurst_,)
was born in 1684, and educated at Oxford. In 1705 he was chosen member
for Cirencester in Gloucestershire. He joined the tory party, and was
one of the opposers of Walpole’s administration. He was created a peer
in 1711. He died in 1775, aged 91. He lived on terms of the greatest
intimacy with Swift, Pope, and other literary men. He was one of the
ablest speakers of the house of lords; and I think, that at the time
when most of his speeches were made, the house of lords contained more
excellent speakers, and divided the palm of eloquence more equally with
the house of commons, than at any other period. One reason why it is
morally impossible that the house of peers should ever be able to rival
the house of commons in the display of splendid talents, is, that all
questions of importance are first debated in the house of commons. Even
if the members of the upper house had any thing of their own to say, the
words are fairly taken out of their mouths.
PHILIP, DUKE OF WHARTON, was born about 1699. He first attached himself
to the Pretender, when he was abroad and quite a young man. He then
returned home and made his peace with government. After this he became a
violent oppositionist; and having at length reduced his fortune by his
extravagance, he went abroad again, where he once more attached himself
to the Pretender, and died 1731. He is represented as a man of talents
by Pope, who has given him a niche in one of his satires.
MR. SHIPPEN was member for Saltash. He was one of the most vehement and
vigorous opposers of the measures of government through the whole of
this reign; and, no doubt, had imbibed a very strong tincture of
Jacobitism. But he was a man of great firmness and independence of mind,
a manly, vigorous, and correct speaker; and whatever his personal
motives or sentiments might have been, the principles which he uniformly
avowed and maintained, were sound and constitutional.
SIR W. WYNDHAM, (_Member for Somersetshire_,) was born 1687. In 1710 he
was made secretary at war, and in 1713 chancellor of the exchequer. He
was dismissed from his place on the accession of George I. and being
suspected of having a concern in the rebellion in 1715, was committed to
the Tower, but liberated without being brought to a trial. He died 1740.
It was to him that Lord Bolingbroke addressed that celebrated letter in
defence of himself, which is the best of all his works.
EARL OF STRAFFORD. I can find no particular account of the author of
this speech, though I suppose he was a descendant of the great lord
Strafford. A noble line seldom furnishes more than one great name. The
succeeding branches seldom add any thing to the illustriousness of the
stock, and are so far from keeping up the name, that they are lost in
it. However I do not discover any marks of degeneracy in the present
instance: one may trace a sort of family likeness in the sentiments; the
pedigree of the mind seems to have been well kept up. There is a
nobility of soul as well as of blood; and the feelings of humanity so
closely and beautifully expressed in the conclusion of this speech, are
such as we should expect from the cultivated descendant of ‘a man of
honour and a cavalier.’
HORACE WALPOLE, (_Brother to Sir Robert_,) was member for Yarmouth. He
seems to have been little inferior to the minister in facility of
speaking, and a certain ambidexterity of political logic. He had the art
to make the question assume at will whatever shape he pleased, and to
make ‘the worse appear the better reason.’ But this seems to have been
more a trick, or an habitual readiness in the common-place forms of
trivial argument, and less owing to natural capacity and quickness of
mind, than it was in his brother. There is also less ease and more
slovenliness, less grace and more of the affectation of it, than are to
be found in his brother’s speeches. He appears more desirous of shewing
his art than of concealing it, and to be proud of the trappings of
ministerial authority which excite the spleen and envy of his opponents.
WILLIAM PULTENEY, (_afterwards Earl of Bath_,) was born 1682, and died
1764. He was the bitterest opponent Sir Robert Walpole ever had, (which
is said to have arisen from some difference between them at the outset
of their political career) and he at length succeeded in driving him
from his situation. He was member for Heydon, in Yorkshire. He lost all
the popularity he had gained by his long opposition to the ministerial
party, when he was made a peer, and sunk into obscurity and contempt. I
think the following is the best of his speeches. He was, however, in
general, a very able speaker. The stile of his speeches is particularly
good, and exactly fitted to produce an effect on a mixed audience. His
sentences are short, direct, pointed; yet full and explicit, abounding
in repetitions of the same leading phrase or idea, whenever this had a
tendency to rivet the impression more strongly in the mind of the
hearer, or to prevent the slightest obscurity or doubt. He also knew
perfectly well how to avail himself of the resources contained in the
stately significance, and gross familiarity of the dialect of the house
of commons. To talk in the character of a great parliamentary leader, to
assume the sense of the house, to affect the extensive views and
disinterested feelings that belong to a great permanent body, and to
descend in a moment to all the pertness and scurrility, the conceit and
self-importance of a factious bully, are among the great arts of
parliamentary speaking. Dogmatical assumptions, consequential airs, and
big words, are what convince and overawe the generality of hearers, who
always judge of others by their pretensions, and feel the greatest
confidence in those who have the least doubt about themselves. There is
also in this gentleman’s speeches, a character, which indeed they had in
common with most of the speeches of the time; that is, they discover a
general knowledge of the affairs of Europe, and of the intrigues,
interests, and engagements of the different courts on the continent;
they shew the statesman, and the man of business, as well as the orator.
These minute details render the speeches of this period long and
uninteresting, which prevented me from giving so many of them as the
ability displayed in them would otherwise have required. This diplomatic
eloquence seems to have been gaining ground from the time of the
revolution. We may see from Lord Bolingbroke’s writings how much the
study of such subjects was in fashion in his time.
SIR GILBERT HEATHCOTE was an alderman of London. He spoke frequently in
the house about this period, and always in a plain, sensible manner.
JOHN LORD CARTERET, (_afterwards Earl of Granville_,) succeeded his
father George lord Carteret when very young. He was educated at Oxford,
and took his seat in the house of lords in 1711, where he distinguished
himself by his zeal for the Hanover succession. In 1719, he went
ambassador to Sweden, and in 1724, was appointed viceroy of Ireland,
where his administration, at a very trying period, was generally
applauded for its wisdom and moderation. He died in 1763. He was a man
of abilities, an highly amiable character, and a great encourager of
learned men. To him it was that the celebrated Hutcheson dedicated his
elegant treatise on beauty and virtue.
MR. CAMPBELL, (_Member for Pembrokeshire_).—He seems in this debate to
have steered clear of any thing like common sense, with such dexterity,
that it would be no difficult matter to pronounce him more knave than
fool. A man cannot be so ingeniously in the wrong by accident. There is
a striking resemblance between the arguments here used, and some that
have been brought forward on more recent occasions. Change the form, the
names, and the date, and in reading this, and the following speech, you
would suppose yourself to be reading the contents of a modern newspaper.
It is astonishing how trite, how thread-bare this subject of politics is
worn; how completely every topic relating to it is exhausted; how little
is left for the invention of low cunning to plume itself upon, or for
honest ambition to boast of! Those who have it in their power may very
wisely devote themselves to politics, either to serve their own ends, or
to serve the public; but it is too late to think of acquiring
distinction in this way. A man can at present only be a retail dealer in
politics: he can only keep a sort of huckster’s shop of ready made
goods. Do what he can, he can only repeat what has already been said a
thousand times, and make a vain display of borrowed wisdom or folly.
“’Twas mine, ’tis his, and may be any man’s.” What gratification there
can be in this to any one, who does not live entirely in the echo of his
own name, I do not understand. I should as soon think of being proud of
wearing a suit of second hand clothes, or marrying another man’s
cast-off mistress. In the beaten path of vulgar ambition, the dull, the
mechanical, the superficial, and the forward press on, and are
successful, while the man of genius, ashamed of his competitors, shrinks
from the contest and is soon lost in the crowd.
SAMUEL SANDYS, (_Member for Worcester_,) was one of the most frequent
and able speakers of this period. What his principles were I do not
know: for the side which any person took at this time, was a very
equivocal test of his real sentiments; toryism, through this and the
preceding reign, generally assuming the shape of resistance to the
encroachments of the prerogative, and attachment to the liberties of the
people.
PHILIP DORMER STANHOPE, (_Earl of Chesterfield_,) was born in 1694. He
was educated at Cambridge, after which he went abroad, and on his return
to England, became a member of the house of commons. In 1726 he
succeeded his father in the house of peers. He was appointed lord
lieutenant of Ireland in 1745, where he continued till 1748. He died
1773. I have given a greater number of his speeches than of any person’s
about this time, because I found them more ingenious, and amusing, and
elegant, than any others. They are steeped in classical allusion; and he
seems always anxious to adjust the dress, and regulate the forms of the
English constitution, by the looking-glass of the Roman commonwealth.
There may be a little sprinkling of academic affectation in this, but it
is much more agreeable than the diplomatic impertinence and official
dulness, which were at that time so much in vogue. His speeches are, in
this respect, a striking contrast to those of Pulteney, Pitt, Pelham,
&c. It has been said that they want force and dignity. If it be meant
that they are not pompous and extravagant, I shall admit the truth of
the objection. But I cannot see why ease is inconsistent with vigour, or
that it is a sign of wisdom to be dull. If his speeches contain as much
good sense, and acute discrimination as those of his rivals, as clearly
expressed, and seasoned with more liveliness of fancy, I should be
disposed to listen to them more attentively, or to read them oftener,
than if, as is often the case, their strength consisted in mere violence
and turbulence, and their only pretensions to wisdom arose from their
want of wit. There is something very peculiar in the form of his
sentences. He perpetually takes up the former part of a sentence, and by
throwing it into the next clause, gives a distinctness and pointedness
to every separate branch of it. His sentences look like a succession of
little smart climaxes. ‘And, therefore, an administration without
esteem—without authority among the people, let their power be never so
great—let their power be never so arbitrary, will be ridiculed. The
severest edicts—the most terrible punishments, cannot prevent it. If any
man, therefore, thinks that he has been censured—if any man thinks he
has been ridiculed, upon any of our public theatres,’ &c. ‘As no man is
perfect, as no man is infallible,’ &c. See his speech on the theatres.
This method, is, I suspect, borrowed from the French: where it suits
with the turn of a man’s mind, it is agreeable enough, and must have a
very good effect in speaking. It is, at least, better than our modern
style of rhetorical architecture, where the nominative case is mounted
up at the top of the page, and the verb fixed at the bottom; than those
circular ladders, and winding-staircases in language, where the whole
hangs suspended in an airy round, and the meaning drops down through the
middle. The late Mr. Pitt was a master of this involved style.
SIR JOHN ST. AUBIN, (_Member for Cornwall_,) was one of that phalanx of
ability and energy, that regularly withstood the insidious
encroachments, and undermining influence of Walpole’s administration.
Their motives for this were no doubt various; but the knowledge, the
soundness of understanding, the firmness and perseverance displayed in
pursuit of their object, cannot be too much admired, and have never been
surpassed. The great questions which had occupied men’s minds from the
time of the revolution, and which still continued to agitate them as
much as ever, the interest in them being kept alive by the doubtful
issue of the contest, had given them a manly tone, a solidity and
fervour which could hardly be produced in any other circumstances. I may
say that men’s minds were never so truly English as they were at this
period. Even the leaven of Jacobitism, which was mingled up with the
sentiments of many of the party, must have contributed to add a zest, a
poignancy, a bitterness of indignation to their opposition to that
overbearing influence, and despotic sway, for the undue exercise of
which they had seen a family, to which they were strongly attached,
driven from the throne. The principles of liberty assented to by both
parties, also gave a freedom and animation to the debates of this
period, and an advantage in attacking any unconstitutional or unpopular
measure, which nothing but the great abilities of the minister, aided by
the general confidence in the government, could have resisted so long as
they did. The following speech of Sir J. St. Aubin, has been often
referred to, and it is one of the most elegant and able compositions to
be found in the records of the house of commons.
SIR WATKIN WILLIAMS WYNNE was member for Denbighshire. It cannot be
denied that the following speech is a real and close examination of the
question.
MR. (afterwards SIR) JOHN BARNARD was originally a merchant, and was
chosen to represent the city of London in parliament, in consequence of
the abilities he displayed on being appointed by the body of wine
merchants to state before the house of lords their objections to a bill
then pending. He continued to represent the city forty years, and so
much to the satisfaction of his constituents, that they erected a statue
to him in the exchange. He was knighted by George II. He was born 1685,
and died 1764.
GEORGE (LORD) LYTTLETON, (_The eldest son of Sir T. Lyttleton_,) was
born 1709, and died 1773. He distinguished himself both as a speaker and
a writer. He appears (as far as I can understand,) to have been one of
those men, who gain a high reputation, not so much by deserving, as by
desiring it; who are constantly going out of their way in search of
fame, and therefore can scarcely miss it; who are led to seize on the
shewy and superficial parts of science by an instinct of vanity, as the
surest means of attracting vulgar applause; who by aiming at what is
beyond them, do at least all that they are capable of; whose anxiety to
distinguish themselves from others, serves them in the place of genius;
and who obtain the good opinion of the public merely by shewing their
deference to it. This character, it must be confessed, however, is
generally united with sensibility and an elegant turn of mind, and is
therefore entitled to some credit: for next to the possession of real
excellence, I think we ought to respect the admiration of it, and the
wish to possess it, or whatever in our power comes the nearest to it.
I must confess that the following Speech on abolishing certain feudal
jurisdictions in Scotland is one of the most elegant and ingenious in
this collection.
WILLIAM PITT, (_afterwards Earl of Chatham_,) was born at Boconnock, in
Cornwall, in 1708, and died in 1778. He was originally an officer in the
army, but was chosen member for Old Sarum in 1735. His history is too
well-known to need repeating here. I shall say something of his talents
as a speaker hereafter.
PHILIP YORKE, (_afterwards Earl of Hardwicke_,) was born 1690, died
1764. He was brought into parliament for Lewes in Sussex in 1718. In
1736, he was made lord chancellor, which situation he held for twenty
years. He is said to have been a great lawyer. If so, a great lawyer may
be a very little man. There is in his speech a _petiteness_, an
insignificant subtlety, an affected originality, a trifling formality,
which any one, not accustomed to the laborious fooleries and idle
distinctions of the law, would be ashamed of. All those of his speeches
that I have read are in the same minute stile of special-pleading,
accompanied with the same apologies for the surprize which must be
occasioned by his microscopical discoveries and methodical
singularities.
JOHN CAMPBELL, (_Second Duke of Argyle_,) was born 1671, and entered
young into the army. He served under the duke of Marlborough: he also
distinguished himself as a statesman, and was an active promoter of the
union, for which he incurred great odium among his own countrymen. In
1712, he was appointed commander in chief in Scotland, and in 1715, he
routed the earl of Mar’s army at Dumblain, and forced the pretender to
quit the kingdom. Notwithstanding his eminent services to the state, he
was deprived of several high offices which he held, for his opposition
to Sir Robert Walpole. He died in 1743. There is a noble monument
erected to his memory in Westminster Abbey. His speeches are
characterized by a rough, plain, manly spirit of good sense, and a
zealous attachment to the welfare of his country.
HONOURABLE EDWARD COKE.—The following speech contains some reflections
that are not inapplicable to the present times. It is curious to observe
how exact a picture the author has exhibited of the present state of
Europe, how literally his fears have been verified, and yet how utterly
unfounded and chimerical they were at the time. One might be tempted to
suppose, in reading the dreams of these forward and self-pleasing
prognosticators, that the scheme of universal empire, with which the
rulers of France have been so often complimented, had familiarized her
imagination to the design, and engendered those high thoughts of
ambition and vanity which have at length rendered her power, not a
glittering phantom, an idle bugbear, a handle for crooked policy, for
low manœuvres, and petty, vexatious, endless hostility, the plaything of
orators and statesmen, but a tremendous and overwhelming reality, that
like a vast incubus overlays the continent of Europe, and benumbs its
lethargic energies.
SIR DUDLEY RYDER.—To those who have to wade through the crude,
undigested mass of the records of parliament, there is such a tedious
monotony, such a dreary vacuity of thought, such an eternal
self-complacent repetition of the same worn-out topics, which seem to
descend like an inheritance from one generation to another, that it is
some relief to escape now and then from the dull jargon of political
controversy. I have given the following speech, though it is
sufficiently dry and uninteresting in itself, because it a little varies
the prospect, and contains something that looks like ingenuity and
argument.
HENRY FOX, ESQ., (_afterwards Lord Holland_,) was the father of the late
celebrated C. J. Fox. Perhaps the reader may be able to trace some
resemblance in their manner of speaking; the same close consecutive mode
of reasoning, and the same disposition to _go round_ his subject, and
view it in its various aspects and bearings.
MR. GRENVILLE.—The following is a neat, clear, logical, and I think
masterly speech on the subject. Nothing could be put in a more simple or
forcible manner.
WILLIAM MURRAY, (_Earl of Mansfield_,) was the fourth son of the earl of
Stormont, and born at Perth in 1705. He was educated at Westminster
school, and afterwards at Oxford, where he took his degrees. On being
called to the bar, his eloquence gained him many admirers; and he was
called by Pope ‘the silver-tongued Murray.’ In 1742, he became
solicitor-general, and was elected member of parliament. In 1754, he was
made attorney-general, and in 1756, chief justice of the king’s bench,
soon after which he was created baron Mansfield. He resigned his office
in 1788, owing to his infirmities, and died in 1793. The reputation
which he acquired, both as a lawyer and a speaker, was not unmerited. I
believe his character has been in all respects as justly appreciated as
that of most men. He was undoubtedly a man of great abilities and great
acquirements; but he was neither a very great nor a very honest man. He
was a man of nice perceptions, of an acute and logical understanding, of
a clear and comprehensive mind, as far as the habits of his profession
and his pursuits in life would suffer him to be so. Indeed it is
difficult to say, what are the capacities of a man of this character,
whose views are cramped and confined by the servility of office; who
adjusts the dimensions of his understanding according to the size of the
occasion; whose reason is constantly the puppet of his will; whose
powers expand in the gleam of popularity, or shrink and shrivel up at
the touch of power. There was a natural antipathy between his mind and
lord Chatham’s. The one was ardent and impetuous: the other was cool,
circumspect, wary, delighting in difficulties and subtlety, proud rather
of distrusting its natural feelings and detecting errors in them, than
impatient of any thing that thwarted their course, and exerting all its
powers to prove them to be right. The manner in which lord Chatham
always spoke of Mansfield was the most pointed that could be: Junius did
not treat him with more sarcastic bitterness and contempt. Indeed there
is a striking coincidence between the opinions and sentiments of that
celebrated writer, and those of lord Chatham, in many respects. They had
the same political creed and the same personal prejudices. Chatham had
not only the same marked dislike to lord Mansfield, but he had evidently
the same personal dislike to the king, always directing his censures not
so much against his measures, as the man; always tracing them beyond his
ministers to the throne itself, and connecting them with a deliberate
plan to overturn the balance of the constitution, and undermine the
liberties of the people. He has expressed the same unpopular opinion
respecting the impressing of seamen that Junius has done; which is
rather singular in two men professing so strong an attachment to the
liberty of the subject, and who so generally appealed to popular
feelings. It is to be remembered, also, that Junius speaks of certain
mysterious arrangements, and expresses himself concerning certain
characters, in a tone of confidence and with a degree of asperity which
could hardly be expected in any one who was not personally acquainted
with the secrets of the cabinet. As to the differences of stile between
Junius’s letters and lord Chatham’s speeches, though they are very
great, I do not think they are so great but that they may be accounted
for from the mere difference between writing and speaking. The materials
themselves are not essentially different: the difference is in the
manner of working them up. There is none of that pointed neatness, that
brilliant contrast, that artificial modulation, and elaborate complexity
in the style of lord Chatham’s speeches that there is in Junius; and
there is a flow, a rapidity, a vehemence and ardour in them, that is
totally wanting in Junius. At the same time, I can easily conceive that
a man like lord Chatham, who has gained the highest reputation as an
orator, and was satisfied with the proofs he had given of the force and
solidity of his mind, should take a pride in exciting the admiration of
the public by the neatness and elegance of his compositions, by adding
delicacy to strength, by the minute refinements and graceful ornaments
of style: as your bold, dashing designers have generally (to shew the
versatility of their talents) executed their small cabinet pieces in a
style of the most highly finished correctness. On the other hand, it is
not at all likely that lord Chatham, even supposing him to have been
master of all the subtlety and exactness of Junius, would have spoken in
any other manner than he did. It would have been nearly impossible to
speak as Junius writes; and besides, he was a man of too much sense to
forego the advantages which his person, voice, and manner afforded him
in that impressive, simple, manly style which he adopted, and which they
could not have afforded him equally in any other, for the reputation of
an elegant speaker. As to the character which Junius gives of lord
Chatham, it is just such a character as a man would give of himself.
Both his silence and his praise are suspicious. Though I do not, on the
whole, think it probable that lord Chatham was the author of Junius, yet
I think that he was by far the most likely person that has been named.
He was about equal to the task. He had the same pith and nerve, the same
acuteness and vigour: he worked in the same metal as Junius, with a
little less sharpness and fineness in the execution, and more boldness
in the design. Burke was above it, Dunning was below it. It was
physically impossible that Burke should have been the author. He could
no more have written Junius, from the exuberance and originality of his
mind, than Dunning could have written it, from the poverty of his. The
speeches of the latter are ‘as dry as the remainder biscuit after a
voyage.’ No human art could have moulded his stiff set meagre sentences,
with all the technical formality and servile exactness of a legal
document, into the harmonious combinations and graceful inflections of
Junius’s style. It is most likely that it will never be known who Junius
really was, and I do not wish it ever should; it is a sort of singular
phenomenon, and curious riddle in the history of literature. It is
better that it should remain a secret, and be something to wonder at,
than that by it’s being explained, every one should become perfectly
satisfied and perfectly indifferent about it.
CHARLES PRATT, (_Earl Camden_,) was the son of Sir John Pratt, and born
in the year 1713. He was educated at Cambridge. He made little figure
for many years after he was called to the bar; but at length, by the
interest of the chancellor Henley, he obtained considerable practice,
and was recommended by him to the friendship of Mr. Pitt, afterwards
lord Chatham. By this means, he successively rose to the stations of
attorney-general, chief justice of the common pleas, and lord
chancellor. He distinguished himself in the latter situations by taking
a decided part against the government, in favour of Wilkes. For this, he
had the freedom of the city of London voted him in a gold box, and his
portrait was stuck up in Guildhall. He was made president of the council
after the American war, which situation he held till his death, in 1794.
He appears to have been a mere party man, without any abilities
whatever, and without that sense of his own deficiencies which atones
for the want of them. He was the legal mouth-piece of Chatham, the
judicial oracle of the party, who gravely returned the answers that were
given him by the political priesthood, of whom he was the organ. He was
one of those dull, plodding, headstrong, honest men, with whom so large
a part of the community naturally sympathise, and of whom it is always
convenient to have one at least in every administration, or
antiministerial party. To the generality of mankind, dulness is the
natural object of sympathy and admiration; it is the element in which
they breathe; it is that which is best fitted to their gross capacities.
The divinity of genius is itself too dazzling an object for them to
behold, and requires the friendly interposition of some thick cloud to
dim its lustre, and blunt the fierceness of its rays. The people love to
idolize greatness in some vulgar representation of it, and to worship
their own likeness in stocks and stones. Lord Camden was just the man to
address those who can only assent, but cannot reason. With men of this
character, the strength of the reasoning always weakens the force of the
argument; their heads will only bear a certain quantity of thought, and
by attempting to enlighten, you only confound their understandings. Any
thing like proof always operates as a negative quantity upon their
prejudices, because it puts them out of their way, and they cannot get
into any other. Nothing can be more feeble than the following reply of
his to lord Mansfield, in which he had pledged himself to prove—I know
not what. He was more ready to throw down his pledges than to redeem
them, (to speak in the parliamentary style). This was of little
consequence. Though often foiled, it did not abate his ardour, or lessen
his confidence: he was still _staunch_ to his cause, and (no matter
whether right or wrong in his argument,) he was always sure of his
conclusion. The less success a man has in maintaining his point, the
more does he shew his steadiness and attachment to his object in
persevering in it in spite of opposition; and the proof of fortitude
which he thus gives must naturally induce all those of the same sanguine
disposition, who have the same zeal and the same imbecility in the
defence of truth, to make common cause with him. Such was lord Camden;
of whom, however, (lest I should seem to have conceived some hasty
prejudice against him,) I must confess that I am by no means convinced
that he was not quite as great a man as the generality of those who have
risen by the same gradations to the same high offices that he did,
either before or since his time.
COLONEL BARRE.—He was one of the most strenuous opposers of lord North’s
administration. Junius says, ‘I would borrow a simile from Burke, or a
sarcasm from Barre.’ There is a vein of shrewd irony, a lively,
familiar, conversational pleasantry running through all his speeches.
_Garrit aniles ex re fabellas._ His eloquence is certainly the most
_naïve_, the most unpremeditated, the most gay and heedless, that can be
imagined. He was really and naturally what Courteney (afterwards) only
pretended to be. [Hazlitt adds in a note]—I am sorry that I can give no
account of this celebrated character. Indeed, I have to apologize to the
reader for the frequent defects and chasms in the biographical part of
the work. I have looked carefully into the dictionaries, but unless a
man happens to have been a nonconformist divine in the last century, a
chymist, or the maker of a new spelling and pronouncing dictionary, his
name is hardly sure of obtaining a place in these learned compilations.
The writers seem, by a natural sympathy, more anxious to bring obscure
merit into notice, than to gratify the idle curiosity of the public
respecting characters on which a dazzling splendor has been shed, by the
accidental circumstances of situation, by superficial accomplishments,
and shewy talents. In giving the history of illustrious statesmen or
politicians, they are very uncertain helps; but if any one had to make
out a list of antiquarians, schoolmasters, or conjurors, he would find
them complete for his purpose. The Barres, the Grenvilles, and the
Townshends, are forgotten; while the Dyches, the Fennings, the Lillys,
and the Laxtons, vie with the heroes and sages of antiquity, in these
motley lists of fame, which like death, level all ranks, and confound
all distinctions.
FREDERICK, LORD NORTH, (_afterwards Earl of Guildford_,) was born in
1732. He succeeded Mr. C. Townshend as chancellor of the exchequer, and
in 1770 was made first lord of the treasury, in which situation he
continued till the close of the American war. He died in 1792. His
speeches are in general, like the following, short, shrewd, and lively,
and quite free from the affectation of oratory. He spoke like a
gentleman, like a man of sense and business, who had to explain himself
on certain points of moment to the country, and who in doing this did
not think that his first object was to shew how well he could play the
orator by the hour. The following masterly character is given of him by
Burke. ‘He was a man of admirable parts; of a general knowledge; of
versatile understanding fitted for every sort of business; of infinite
wit and pleasantry; of a delightful temper; and with a mind most
perfectly disinterested. But it would be only to degrade myself by a
weak adulation, and not to honour the memory of a great man, to deny
that he wanted something of the vigilance and spirit of command that the
time required.’
The following Speech is a most masterly defence of himself. It is a
model in its kind.
MR. BURKE was born at Dublin, January 1, 1730. His father was a
respectable attorney, and a Protestant. He received his school education
under Abraham Shackleton, a Quaker; and whenever Mr. Burke afterwards
visited Ireland, he always went to see his old tutor. In 1746, he
entered as a scholar at Trinity College, which he left, after taking his
bachelor’s degree, in 1749. Not long after, he became candidate for the
professorship of logic, at Glasgow, but did not succeed. In 1753, he
entered himself of the Inner Temple, but he did not apply very closely
to the study of the law, and supported himself by writing for the
booksellers. In 1756, he published his Vindication of Natural Society,
and in 1757 his Essay on the Sublime and Beautiful. He was first brought
into parliament for the borough of Wendover, by the interest of lord
Rockingham, to whom he had been private secretary. He soon after
published his Thoughts on the Causes of the Present Discontents. In
1774, he was invited by the citizens of Bristol to become one of their
representatives; but at the next election, he was rejected by them, for
having supported the free trade of Ireland and the Catholic claims, and
was returned for Malton, in Yorkshire. The rest of his political life is
too well known to need recapitulating here. The part he took against the
French revolution was the most important and memorable event of his
life. He withdrew from parliament in 1794, leaving his seat for Malton
to his son, who died shortly after. This hastened his death, which
happened in July, 1797. The best character of him, and perhaps the
finest that ever was drawn of any man, is that by Goldsmith, in his poem
of Retaliation.
THE HONOURABLE C. J. FOX was born Jan. 13, 1748. He was educated first
at Eton and afterwards at Hertford College, Oxford. He was returned to
Parliament for Midhurst in 1768. He was at first on the side of
ministry, but declared himself on the side of opposition on the dispute
with America. He became secretary for foreign affairs in 1782, and again
in 1806, when it was too late for his country and himself. He died
September, 1806. Of this great man I shall speak more at large when I
come to his later speeches. The following boyish rhapsody, on a question
relating to the Lowther estate, is remarkable only for its contrast to
the speeches which he made afterwards—for its affectation and bluster
and imbecility. It may be easily believed, as is reported of him, that
at the time he made this and other speeches like it, he wore red heels
and blue powder, and was distinguished as the greatest coxcomb in
Europe. He was not then the same figure that I afterwards beheld in the
Louvre, with hairs grown grey in the service of the public, with a face
pale and furrowed with thought, doing honour to the English character as
its best representative, conciliating by his frank, simple, unaffected
manners, the affection and esteem of strangers, and wandering carelessly
and unconsciously among those courts and palaces, whose profound policy
and deep-laid machinations he alone, by his wisdom and the generous
openness of his nature, was able to resist. His first acquaintance with
Burke seems to have been the æra of his manhood; or rather, it was then
that he first learned to know himself, and found his true level. A man
in himself is always the same, though he may not always appear to be so.
SIR W. MEREDITH.—This speech discovers true zeal and earnestness. It
seems to belong to an earlier period of our history.
I have already said something in praise of his speeches. They have in
them what an old poet calls ‘veins of nature’—a heartfelt simplicity,
before which wit, and elegance, and acuteness, and the pomp of words,
sink into insignificance.
MR. SAWBRIDGE.—Junius praises this city orator and patriot for his
republican firmness. If he is to be taken as a model of the republican
character, he does not, in my opinion, reflect much credit on it. In the
following speech there is all the impudence, indecency, grossness, and
vulgarity, of a factious demagogue. This character, I know not how,
unfortunately sprung up in the beginning of the present reign.
COLONEL (afterwards GEN.) BURGOYNE was the natural son of lord Bingley.
His defeat and capture by general Gates determined the issue of the
contest with America. As a writer and a speaker, he had more success,
though he aimed at more than he effected. His Heiress is a feeble,
though a very elegant comedy; and in his speeches, which are modelled
according to the rules of Cicero, his own abilities and his own modesty
take up half of the paper, and the reader’s attention is equally divided
between the speaker and the subject. At the same time, if they were a
little less affected, they would not be without merit.
MR. JENKINSON. (_The present Earl of Liverpool_).
‘Servetur ad imum
‘Qualis ab incœptu processerit, & sibi constet.’
HON. TEMPLE LUTTREL.—I have introduced the following Speech as an
exquisite specimen of unaccountably absurd affectation.
MR. WILKES, (_the Lord Mayor_).—This celebrated man was born in 1728. In
1761, he was elected member for Aylesbury, about which time he excited
the indignation of ministry by publishing a periodical paper, called the
North Briton, for the forty-fifth number of which he was apprehended by
a general warrant. He was however liberated, and became the patriot of
the day. He was soon after expelled the house for his Essay on Woman. He
was repeatedly returned for Middlesex after this, but the election was
always declared void, till 1774, when he took his seat without
opposition. The following speech in his own defence contains the
clearest, most logical, and best argued case, that has been made out on
that side of the question. He takes the same ground, and often uses the
same words as Junius, but I think he establishes his point more
satisfactorily. He was a clear, correct, able, and eloquent speaker. His
conversational talents were very brilliant. He was a very ugly and a
very debauched man, but a great favourite with the women, whom he
accordingly satirized without mercy. He died 1797.
MR. DUNNING, (_afterwards Lord Ashburton_,) was born at Ashburton, in
Devonshire, in 1731. After studying some time under his father, who was
an attorney, he entered at the Temple, and on being called to the bar,
soon rose to eminence in his profession: he obtained a seat in
parliament, and became one of the most distinguished members of
opposition at this period. He died 1782. The following is the most
brilliant display of his eloquence that I have met with; which I was at
some pains to pick out from among the shreds and patches that remain of
his speeches. In general, he was neither an elegant nor an agreeable
speaker. His style was dry, harsh, formal, and pedantic. His legal
knowledge is said to have been very great: but as this is a subject
which I do not understand, I must leave it to the lawyers to pronounce
his panegyric in ‘good set terms’ of their own.
THOMAS (LORD) LYTTLETON succeeded his father in 1773. He was a young man
of great talents, but very profligate in his manners. He died in 1779,
at the age of 35.
WILLIAM PITT, (_son of the late Earl of Chatham_,) was born in 1759. He
was educated at Cambridge. He entered at Lincoln’s-Inn, and was called
to the bar, where he had not much practice. He was just returned to
parliament for the borough of Appleby. The following is the first speech
he made in the house, on economical reform. He became chancellor of the
exchequer in 1783, which office he continued till 1801. He then retired,
but came in again in 1804, and continued in that office till his death,
January 1806.
MR. SHERIDAN.—Richard Brinsley Sheridan, one of the most brilliant
speakers that ever appeared in the house of commons, was born in 1750.
He was known to the public before he came into parliament, as having
written the best comedies of the age. He was returned member for
Stafford in 1780, which place he continued to represent till the last
election, in 1806, when he succeeded Fox as member for Westminster. On
Fox’s accession to office in the beginning of the same year, he was
appointed treasurer of the navy. The following is his first speech in
the house. He has said more witty things than ever were said by any one
man in the house of commons: but at present one may say of him, ‘The
wine of life is drunk and but the lees remain.’
I have retained the compliment with which the following speech is
prefaced in the report from which it is taken, ‘that it was the most
brilliant reply that perhaps was ever made in the House of Commons,’
because I am half inclined to be of the same opinion. The expression
_brilliant_ belongs peculiarly to Sheridan’s style of eloquence. For
brilliant fancy, for vivacity of description, for animation, for
acuteness, for wit, for good sense and real discrimination, for seeing
the question at once just in the right point of view, being neither
perplexed with the sophisms of others, nor led away by the warmth of his
own imagination, he was (I do not say he is) equal to any of his
competitors; for he has got none left (except indeed Windham, who is
however as different a man as can be). I have made more _fuss_ about
some other speakers, but to say the truth, he is about as good as the
best of them. He was undoubtedly the second public man after Fox, both
with respect to talents, and firmness to his principles.
SIR GEORGE SAVILLE, (_Member for Yorkshire_,) distinguished himself by
his opposition to the American war, and by bringing in the bill for the
repeal of the penal statutes against the Roman Catholics. His speeches
abound with real wit and humour. He died 1784, at the age of 59.
MR. GRATTAN.—I do not, I confess, like this style, though it is what
many people call eloquent. There is a certain spirit and animation in
it, but it is over-run with affectation. It is at the same time
mechanical, uncouth, and extravagant. It is like a piece of Gothic
architecture, full of quaintness and formality. It is ‘all horrid’ with
climax and alliteration and epithet and personification. ‘From injuries
to arms, and from arms to liberty: precedent and principle, the Irish
volunteers, and the Irish parliament.’ I am not fond of these double
facings, and splicings and clenches in style. They too much resemble a
garden laid out according to Pope’s description,
‘Where each alley has a brother,
And half the platform just reflects the other.’
MR. CURRAN.—This celebrated pleader has been called by some, who
probably intended it as a compliment, the Irish Erskine. I do not know
what the effect of their manner may be, having never heard them; but
this I know, that as to their _written_ speeches, there is no comparison
either with respect to brilliancy or solidity between Erskine’s speeches
and those of Curran. The speeches of the latter are also free from that
affectation, or false glitter, which is the vice of Irish eloquence.
Every Irish orator thinks himself bound to be a Burke. But according to
the old axiom, no man is bound to do that which he cannot.
MR. CANNING.—This gentleman writes verses better than he makes speeches.
If he had as much understanding as he has wit, he would be a great man:
but that is not the case. _Non omnia possumus omnes._ However, there is
a degree of elegance and brilliancy, and a certain ambitious tip-toe
elevation in his speeches. But they want manliness, force, and dignity.
His eloquence is something like a bright, sharp-pointed sword, which,
owing to its not being made of very stout metal, bends and gives way,
and seems ready to snap asunder at every stroke; and he is perpetually
in danger of having it wrested out of his hands.
MR. HORNE TOOKE.—I shall only say of the following speech that it is
worthy of the celebrated man by whom it was delivered.
NOTES
FREE THOUGHTS ON PUBLIC AFFAIRS
PAGE
2. _‘There is wisdom,’ etc._ _Proverbs_ xv. 22.
_The late administration._ Pitt’s second ministry. Pitt died on
Jan. 23, 1806, and Fox became Foreign Secretary in the Ministry
of ‘All the Talents.’
3. _Mr. Addington._ Henry Addington (1757–1844), created Viscount
Sidmouth in 1805, was Prime Minister and Chancellor of the
Exchequer during the peace negotiations.
_Came home to the bosoms, etc._ Bacon, Dedication to the Essays
(1625).
5. _‘The unconquerable will,’ etc._ _Paradise Lost_, I. 106–9.
_‘The still small voice,’ etc._ _1 Kings_ xix. 12.
6. _It certainly had this good effect._ ‘The peace of Amiens,’ said
Coleridge, ‘deserved the name of peace, for it gave us unanimity
at home, and reconciled Englishmen with each other’ (_The
Friend_, section I. Essay 6).
7. _The incautious surrender of Malta._ By the treaty of Amiens
(1802) Malta was restored to the Knights of St. John. By the
first Peace of Paris (1814) it was given to England.
_One to whose authority, etc._ Few people at the time recognised
the importance of Malta to Great Britain. Lord Nelson himself
spoke slightingly of it, and so did Pitt. See _Parl. Hist._
XXXVI., _passim_, for the discussions in Parliament. Coleridge,
in _The Friend_ (see especially Essays 3, 4, 5, and 6 of ‘The
Third Landing-Place’), while defending the retention of Malta,
admitted that Nelson was right in denying that Malta was the key
of Egypt (Bohn’s ed., p. 382).
8. _‘Against infection,’ etc._ _Richard II._, Act II. Scene 1.
10. ‘_Another Iliad of woes._’ Burke’s _Regicide Peace_ (_Select
Works_, ed. Payne, p. 116). Cf. ‘From hence those tears, that
Ilium of our woe.’ Dryden’s _The Medal_, l. 67.
12. _The partition of Poland._ In 1795. Suwarroff, the Russian
general, stormed Ismael on Dec. 11, 1790, and Warsaw on Nov. 4,
1794. ‘Thirty thousand persons, of whom one half were
inhabitants of the town, perished in the assault of Ismael’
(Alison, _History of Europe_, X. 455). At Warsaw ‘about twelve
thousand citizens, of every age and sex, were put to the sword’
(_ib._, III. 526).
14. _Had not Austria, etc._ Precipitated, he means, by the subsidising
policy of Pitt. The battle of Austerlitz (Dec. 2, 1805)
completely crushed Austria.
_The character of Mr. Pitt, etc._ Hazlitt repeated this
‘character’ down to ‘And in its liquid texture,’ etc. (p. 18),
in his _Political Essays_ (see _ante_, pp. 346–350) and in _The
Round Table_ (see Vol. I. pp. 125–128).
15. _The fog and haze._ A phrase of Burke’s (_Reflections on the
Revolution in France, Select Works_, ed. Payne, II. 55).
Note. _When Mr. Fox last summer._ On June 21, 1805. See Hansard’s
_Parl. Debates_, V. 542.
16. _Described by Hobbes._ _Behemoth_ (_Works_, ed. Molesworth, VI.
240).
18. _‘Not matchless,’ etc._ _Paradise Lost_, VI. 341–2.
_‘And in its liquid texture,’ etc._ _Paradise Lost_, VI. 348–9.
Note. Hazlitt printed this essay of Coleridge’s in _Political
Essays_ (see _ante_, pp. 350–356) under the title of ‘Pitt and
Buonaparte.’
20. _‘Some happier island,’ etc._ Pope, _Essay on Man_, I. 106–8.
21. _‘Virtue is not their habit,’ etc._ Burke’s _Regicide Peace_ (ed.
Payne, p. 105).
22. _‘Lay the fault upon themselves,’ etc._ Julius Cæsar, Act I. Scene
2.
_‘Dull as her lakes,’ etc._ Goldsmith’s _The Traveller_, l. 312.
23. _‘When, stript,’ etc._ Goldsmith’s _The Traveller_, ll. 355–60.
_‘They think there is nothing real,’ etc._ ‘They think there is
nothing worth pursuit, but that which they can handle; which
they can measure with a two-foot rule; which they can tell upon
two fingers.’ Burke’s _Regicide Peace_ (ed. Payne, p. 105).
POLITICAL ESSAYS
The title-page contained a motto from _Twelfth Night_ (Act I. Scene 5):
‘Come, draw the curtain, shew the picture,’
29. John Hunt (1780?–1848), an elder brother of Leigh Hunt, was
with him the joint founder of _The Examiner_ in 1808. The two
brothers were at first joint proprietors, John being printer and
manager and Leigh Hunt editor. John Hunt was twice in prison,
for two years (1813–5) for a libel on the Prince Regent, and
again for one year (1821–2) for a libel on the House of Commons.
For an account of his services to journalism see Fox Bourne’s
_English Newspapers_ (I. 335–51).
32. ‘_In contempt of the choice of the people._’ Burke’s _Reflections
on the Revolution in France_ (_Select Works_, ed. Payne, II.
17). In his _Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs_ (1791) Burke
defends and elaborates the constitutional doctrines of the
_Reflections_.
33. ‘_The envy of less happier lands._’ _Richard II._, Act II. Scene
1.
_Sworn brother to the Pope._ Because the sworn enemy of Hazlitt’s
hero, Napoleon, who abolished the Inquisition in Spain in 1808.
Ferdinand VII. restored it in 1814.
_Arbuthnot._ John Arbuthnot (1667–1735), whose famous pamphlet
_The History of John Bull_ (as it was afterwards called)
appeared in 1712.
_Flocci, etc._ These words are the beginning of a rule in the old
Latin grammars which brings together a number of words meaning
‘of no account.’ See _Letters of Charles Lamb_ (ed. Ainger), I.
62.
34. _‘One fate attends,’ etc._ Southey’s _Carmen Nuptiale_, Stanza 51.
‘_At one fell swoop._’ _Macbeth_, Act IV. Scene 3.
_‘That painted sepulchre,’ etc._ ‘_Whited_ sepulchres,’ etc. _St.
Matthew_ xxiii. 27.
_‘Bogs, dens,’ etc._ _Paradise Lost_, II. 621–2.
35. ‘_Awhile they stood abashed._’
‘abashed the Devil stood,
And felt how awful goodness is.’
_Paradise Lost_, IV. 846–7.
_‘Never can true reconcilement,’ etc._ _Ib._, IV. 98.
36. _Lord Castlereagh._ Robert Stewart (1769–1822), who became
Viscount Castlereagh in 1796, and second Marquis of Londonderry
in 1821, was Irish Chief Secretary during the Rebellion and the
passing of the Act of Union (1798–1801), War Secretary
(1807–1809), and Foreign Secretary from 1812 till his death.
After the death of Pitt he may be regarded as the chief
representative of Great Britain in the struggle against
Napoleon. That accounts for Hazlitt’s hatred, but he was for
many reasons (some of which appear in the _Political Essays_)
the best hated minister of his time.
_Benjamin Constant_ (1767–1830), the French Liberal politician,
was banished from France in 1802 for denouncing the despotic
acts of Napoleon. He returned to France after the restoration of
the Bourbons and advocated constitutional freedom.
_‘That Harlot old,’ etc._ Southey’s _Carmen Nuptiale_, Stanza 52.
_Douce humanité._ A phrase used by Burke in speaking of the
revolution party in France. _A Letter to a Noble Lord_ (_Works_,
Bohn, V. 140).
37. _‘At this day,’ etc._ Wordsworth’s _The Excursion_, Book IV.
‘_Tickling commodities._’ _King John_, Act II. Scene 1.
_The case of the Income-Tax._ The ministry’s five per cent
property tax (as it was called) was rejected by the House of
Commons on March 19, 1816, by 238 votes to 201. See Walpole’s
_History of England_, I. 408–10.
‘_A feeling disputation._’ _Henry IV._, Part I., Act III. Scene 1.
38. _Mr. Robson brought forward, etc._ On March 4, 1802. The bill was
for £19 odd. On March 8, Addington admitted that it had not been
paid. See _Parl. Hist._ XXXVI. 346–50.
_The Great Vulgar and the Small._ Cowley, Horace, _Odes_, III. 1.
39. _Never is, etc._ Pope’s _Essay on Man_, I. 93. In Hazlitt’s
composite portrait of ‘a Reformer,’ there seems to be a good
deal of Godwin.
_Mr. Place._ Francis Place (1771–1854), the radical tailor. John
Cam Hobhouse (1786–1869), Byron’s friend, was defeated at
Westminster by George Lamb in February 1819. For Place’s
_Report_ to the Westminster electors, presented to a public
meeting, Feb. 9, 1819, see Wallas, _Life of Francis Place_,
134–9.
40. _One of these virtuosos._ The description seems to fit Hazlitt’s
conception of Godwin. See _Spirit of the Age_.
_Nicolas Gimcracks of Reform._ See Hazlitt’s _Table Talk_ (‘On
will making’), where the will of ‘a certain virtuoso,’ Nicholas
Gimcrack, is quoted from _The Tatler_ (No. 216).
_‘Pleased with a feather,’ etc._ Pope’s _Essay on Man_, II. 276.
‘_The giant-mass._’ _Troilus and Cressida_, Act I. Scene 3.
_Another, more bold, etc._ Cobbett, no doubt.
41. _Dance the hays._ _Love’s Labour’s Lost_, Act V. Scene 1.
_‘Perpetual circle,’ etc._
‘——that in quaternion run
Perpetual circle, multiform, and mix
And nourish all things,’ etc.
_Paradise Lost_, V. 181–3.
_Going with Sancho, etc._ _Don Quixote_, Second Part, Book II.,
chaps, xx. and xxi.
‘_The best of kings._’ See vol. I., note to p. 305.
42. _Epicuri de grege porcus._ Horace, _Epistles_, I. iv. 16.
_‘When a great wheel,’ etc._ _King Lear_, Act II. Scene 4.
_A Theophilanthropist._ The name of a sect established by Thomas
Paine in Paris in 1797.
_‘Wiser in his generation,’ etc._ _St. Luke_ xvi. 8.
42. ‘_Servile slaves._’ _The Faerie Queene_, Book II. Canto vii. St.
33.
43. _‘Screw their courage,’ etc._ _Macbeth_, Act I. Scene 7.
44. _‘Are subdued,’ etc._ _Othello_, Act I. Scene 3.
_Holland House._ Best described by Macaulay in the _Edinburgh
Review_ (July 1841—_Essays_, Lord Holland). The third Lord
Holland (1773–1840) was a consistent champion of Buonaparte,
which makes it strange that Hazlitt should have written and
republished this sneer at Holland House.
_My Lord Erskine._ Thomas Erskine (1750–1823), the great Whig
advocate, Lord Chancellor in the ‘Talents’ Ministry (1806–7). He
had recently been decorated by the Regent with the Knighthood of
the Thistle.
_‘Untaught knaves,’ etc._ _Henry IV._, Part I. Act I. Scene 3.
_Ultima ratio regum._ It was a maxim of Richelieu’s that ‘le canon
est l’_ultima ratio_ des rois.’
_‘Strange that such difference,’ etc._ John Byrom, _On the Feuds
between Handel and Bononcini_.
_‘Nearly are allied,’ etc._ Dryden’s _Absalom and Achitophel_,
Part I. 163–4.
_The ********* and ********* Reviews._ The _Edinburgh_ and
_Quarterly Reviews_.
46. _‘Letting I dare not,’ etc._ _Macbeth_, Act I. Scene 7.
_‘But ’tis the fall,’ etc._ Pope, _Epilogue to the Satires_, I.
143 _et seq._
47. _‘And such other gambol faculties,’ etc._ _Henry IV._, Part II.
Act II. Scene 4.
_The Marquess Wellesley’s opening speech._ On April 9, 1813.
Richard Colley Wellesley (1760–1842), the eldest brother of the
Duke of Wellington, created Marquess Wellesley in 1799 for his
services in India, had been Foreign Secretary from 1809 to 1812,
but had failed to form a ministry after the assassination of
Percival, and was now out of office.
_‘All hail him,’ etc._ Pope, _The Dunciad_, ii. 267–8.
Note. The passage in the text is not quite accurately quoted from
_The Morning Chronicle_ (April 14, 1813). John Wilson Croker
(1780–1857) was Secretary to the Admiralty for twenty-two years
(1809–30).
_‘Strange that such difference,’ etc._ See _ante_, note to p. 44.
_‘Fillip the ears,’ etc._ _Henry IV._, Part II. Act I. Scene 2.
48. MR. SOUTHEY, POET LAUREAT. From _The Morning Chronicle_, Sept.
18, 1813. See Lockhart’s _Life of Scott_ (vol. III. p. 88) and
Southey’s Preface to vol. III. of the collected edition of his
Poems (1837) for particulars as to Southey’s laureateship. He
made it a condition of his acceptance of the post that he should
not be required to write the old formal odes, but that he should
be free to choose his own time for celebrating any great public
event.
_Mr. Croker, to whom, etc._ Southey’s _Life of Nelson_, dedicated
to Croker, was published in 1813, with a motto from Canning’s
_Ulm and Trafalgar_ (1806).
_Lord Liverpool._ Robert Banks Jenkinson (1770–1828), after 1796
known by courtesy as Lord Hawkesbury, and raised to the peerage
with that title in 1803, succeeded his father as Earl of
Liverpool in 1808, and was Prime Minister for fifteen years
(1812–27). The second Marquis of Hertford (1743–1822) was Lord
Chamberlain from 1812 to 1821.
49. MR. SOUTHEY’S NEW-YEAR’S ODE. This paper is reprinted from
_The Morning Chronicle_, Jan. 8, 1814.
‘_Poets succeed best in fiction._’ The reply of Edmund Waller to
Charles II., who had complained of the inferiority of the poet’s
verses on the Restoration as compared with his panegyric on
Cromwell.
_Duke’s Place._ Situated within the priory of Holy Trinity without
Aldgate, belonging to the Duke of Norfolk. ‘A new church in the
priory precinct, dedicated to St. James, was consecrated January
2, 1622–23, and became one of the most notorious places in
London for those irregular marriages which, under the name of
Fleet marriages, were the cause of so much scandal in the latter
half of the seventeenth century, and until they were put an end
to by the Act of 1753,’ Wheatley and Cunningham’s _London Past
and Present_, i. 532.
_Academy of compliments._ See note to vol. I. p. 235.
50. _‘Age after age,’ etc._ Stanza 8.
_The Lady’s Magazine._ ‘The Lady’s Magazine or entertaining
Companion for the fair sex’ (1770–1818).
_‘Open thy gates, O Hanover,’ etc._ Stanza 16.
51. _Like Virgil._ _Georgics_, i. 80.
_‘And France,’ etc._ Stanza 18.
_Very nearly succeeded._ In _The Morning Chronicle_ appeared the
following paragraph: ‘As Mr. Southey’s Ode by no means satisfied
the poetical appetite which it had excited in us, we turned
after reading it, to Spenser’s fine Canto on Mutability, and
afterwards to some lines written by one who did not join the
song of the avengers _twice_. Mr. Southey, by the new form of
publishing his Ode, having prevented us from gratifying our
readers with it as _a public entertainment_, we shall try to
make amends by these lines of Milton, which, we believe, have
not yet been quoted in The Times.’ [Here follow ll. 113–131 of
_Lycidas_].
DOTTRELL-CATCHING. From _The Morning Chronicle_, Jan. 27, 1814.
‘_Spunge, you are dry again._’ _Hamlet_, Act IV. Scene 2.
_A celebrated writer._ This appears to have been Edward Sterling
(Vetus). See p. 99.
52. _Struldbruggs._ _Gulliver’s Travels_ (Voyage to Laputa), Part III.
Chap. x.
_Eiconoclastes Satyrane._ ‘Satyrane’s Letters’ was the name given
to Coleridge’s letters from Germany, published in _The Friend_
in 1809, and republished in _Biographia Literaria_. Hazlitt
concluded his letter to _The Morning Chronicle_ with a quotation
from Wordsworth (_Ode, Intimations of Immortality_, Stanza 10)—
‘What though the radiance which was once so bright,’ etc.
THE BOURBONS AND BONAPARTE. From _The Morning Chronicle_, Dec. 6,
1813.
53. _The virtuous Moreau._ Jean Victor Moreau (1761–1813), banished by
Napoleon in 1804, returned to Europe in 1813 and joined the
allies. He died in Sept. 1813 of a wound received from a French
cannon-ball at the battle of Dresden. For Hazlitt’s opinion of
Moreau see his _Life of Napoleon_, chap. xlix.
54. _‘Bid him prepare,’ etc._ _Henry V._, Act IV. Scene 4.
_‘Reverbs,’ etc._ _King Lear_, Act I. Scene 1.
_‘Flows on to the Propontic,’ etc._
‘——Like to the Pontic sea,
Whose icy current and compulsive course
Ne’er feels retiring ebb, but keeps due on
To the Propontic and the Hellespont!’
_Othello_, Act III. Scene 3.
‘_The deserter of Smorgonne._’ At Smorgoni Buonaparte left his
army on Dec. 5, 1812, during the retreat from Moscow.
_Sir Humphrey Davy._ Sir Humphry Davy (1778–1829), the great
natural philosopher, knighted in 1812.
55. _Like Hellenore, etc._ See _The Faerie Queene_, Book III. Cantos
ix. and x.
56. _‘This is the very coinage,’ etc._ _Hamlet_, Act III. Scene 4.
_No such army._ In _The Morning Chronicle_ there is the following
note to this passage: ‘One is here reminded of the pathetic
exhortation addressed to honest _Sly_, in the _Taming of the
Shrew_ [Induction, Scene 2]:—
“Why, Sir, you know no house,
Nor no such men as you have reckon’d up,
As Stephen Sly, and Old John Naps of Greece,
And Peter Turf, and Henry Pimpernel,
And twenty more such names and men as these,
Which never were, nor no man ever saw.”
The difference in the two cases is, that poor _Sly_ was persuaded
out of his senses by other people, and that our paragraph writer
would persuade his readers out of theirs.’
‘_To the very echo._’ _Macbeth_, Act V. Scene 3.
57. _Darkness that might be felt._ _Exodus_, x. 21.
‘_Impaling fire._’ ‘Impaled with circling fire.’ _Paradise Lost_,
II. 647.
VETUS. From _The Morning Chronicle_, Nov. 19, 1813. ‘Vetus’ was
the signature of Edward Sterling (1773–1847), who became a
regular member of _The Times_ staff, and earned for it the
nickname of ‘The Thunderer.’ Some of the Letters of Vetus were
republished in 1812. See Carlyle’s _Life of John Sterling_, who
was Edward Sterling’s son.
58. _‘A cry of hell-hounds,’ etc._ _Paradise Lost_, II. 654.
ON THE COURIER AND TIMES NEWSPAPERS. From _The Morning Chronicle_,
Jan. 21, 1814.
59. _Formally signified from the throne._ See the Prince Regent’s
speech on opening Parliament Nov. 4, 1813, and Lord Liverpool’s
speech on the Address (_Hansard_, xxvii. 5, 22).
_Lord Castlereagh._ Castlereagh represented England informally at
the Congress of Châtillon (February and March, 1814) where he
opposed the restoration of the Bourbons by the arms of the
allies.
60. ‘_What, stab men in the dark._’ ‘Kill men i’ the dark.’ _Othello_,
Act V. Scene 1.
_The Editor of ‘The Times.’_ Hazlitt’s brother-in-law, John
(afterwards Sir John) Stoddart (1773–1856) was editor from 1812
to 1817.
61. _‘Of heroic sentiment,’ etc._ Burke’s _Reflections on the
Revolution in France_ (_Select Works_, ed. Payne, II. 89).
_The treaty of Pilnitz._ A declaration signed by the Emperor of
Austria and the King of Prussia in August, 1791, the object of
which was to secure the safety of Louis XVI. after his
imprisonment by the Revolution government. Fox described the
treaty, or rather the declaration, as ‘an act of hostile
aggression,’ and Hazlitt hated it because it ‘gave its sanction
to the invasion of France, and commenced the war of the
Revolution (_Life of Napoleon_, Chap. v.).
_The French ‘petit maitre.’_ _Roderick Random_, Chap, xliii.
_Don Quixote._ Book III. Chap. xv.
62. _‘That we might spill our blood,’ etc._ ‘The blood of man should
never be shed but to redeem the blood of man. It is well shed
for our family, for our friends, for our God, for our country,
for our kind.’ Burke’s _Regicide Peace_ (_Select Works_, ed.
Payne, p. 67).
_‘The meanest peasant,’ etc._ A phrase of Vetus’s. See p. 75.
_Carl John._ Jean Baptiste Jules Bernadotte (1764–1844), the son
of a lawyer.
He was elected heir to the crown of Sweden and succeeded to the
throne as Charles XIV. in 1818. Hazlitt of course hated ‘this
man’ (as he contemptuously calls him) as a traitor to his idol
Buonaparte. See _Life of Napoleon_ (Chap. xliii, especially).
Bernadotte had married an early love of Buonaparte’s, and ‘thy
little son’ (Oscar) was the Emperor’s god-son. Sweden joined the
alliance against Napoleon in April, 1812.
_‘Monarchize,’ etc._ _Richard II._, Act III. Scene 2.
_‘The flame of sacred vehemence,’ etc._ _Julius Caesar_, Act III.
Scene 2.
63. _General Blucher’s manifesto._ Hazlitt probably refers to a
manifesto addressed by Blücher to the Army of Silesia on Jan. 3,
1814, in which he says, ‘Now you are going to pass the Rhine to
force peace from the enemy who cannot console himself for having
lost, in two campaigns, the conquest which he had made during
nineteen years.’
_Favourably interpreted._ In _The Morning Chronicle_ the article
proceeded as follows:—‘The classical pen of _The Courier_ not
long ago charged us with spoiling one of the finest passages in
Shakespeare. We should be sorry if the charge were true, because
we have really more respect for this great English genius than
for a whole legion of “gentlemen and men of honour,” of the old
or the new stamp, by tradition or by patent. We have not indeed
read the extracts in _The Courier_ from Mr. Coleridge’s Lectures
at Bristol, and wanting that new light, may perhaps be blind
idolaters.
‘There are, however, one or two passages in the play of
_Coriolanus_ besides the fine one which we are said to have
marred, which we thought conveyed a great deal of meaning. The
first is the speech of _Aufidius_ [Act V. Scene 3], which seems
to us a transcript of what must pass in Buonaparte’s mind, in
reading the hyperboles of _The Times_ and _The Courier_—
“I’m glad thou set’st thy mercy and thy honour
At difference in thee: out of this I’ll work
Myself a former fortune.”
The second [Act III. Scene 2] we leave for their own application.
“Away, my disposition, and possess me
Some harlot’s spirit: the smiles of knaves
Tent in my cheeks, and school-boys’ tears take up
The glasses of my sight: a beggar’s tongue
Make motion through my lips.—I will not do it,
Lest I surcease to honour mine own truth,
And by my body’s action, teach my mind
A most inherent baseness.”
‘It is said that there is no reason why we should not _propose_ to
the French people (there was a time when we would not suffer
them to chuse for themselves) the restoration of the Bourbons.
Why no, except that it is a great piece of impudence to hint to
them as a modest proposal, and in the way of free choice, what
we have been endeavouring to impose upon them so long as a
matter of necessity. The question is, whether we are to enforce
the adoption of this free boon by the same process as before.
_The Times_ say, “We have given a native Prince to Holland and
to Spain. Why then not to France?” Does the writer still persist
that there is no difference between the two cases?
‘We have made these remarks, not with a view to irritate or
recriminate, but to resist irritation and recrimination, by
which we can at this moment gain nothing that we ought to gain.
There is one ground of peace, just, honourable, attainable,
secure, and permanent, which is laid down in the Declaration of
the Allies, and by his Majesty’s Ministers—there is another,
recommended by _The Times_ and _Courier_, and pursued by the
Cossacks, namely, the desolation and degradation of France—which
is neither safe, nor just, nor practicable, nor desirable. If
the Allies, for any contingent advantage, or to gratify any old
grudge, for any fancies or for any prejudices, throw away their
present opportunities of making peace, and of making it
permanent by the very act of having made it in the spirit of
moderation and justice—if they forego their present imposing
attitude, of having repelled invasion and maintained their own
independence, for the chance of retorting aggression on others,
and insulting that national independence which they profess to
consider as inviolable, by dictating to France her form of
government under pretence of offering her peace, then we say,
they will richly deserve to reap all the natural consequences of
their mistaken policy. On their heads and on those of their
advisers be the responsibility.’
ILLUSTRATIONS OF VETUS. _The Morning Chronicle_, Dec. 2, 1813.
_‘Those nauseous harlequins,’ etc._ Dryden, Epilogue to Sir G.
Etherege’s ‘The Man of Mode, or Sir Fopling Flutter’ (1676).
64. _Don Adriano de Armado._ In _Love’s Labour’s Lost_. ‘Will you hear
this letter with attention? As we would hear an oracle.’ Act I.
Scene 1.
‘_I am Sir Oracle._’ _Merchant of Venice_, Act I. Scene 1.
_The hero of Cervantes._ _Don Quixote_, Part I. Book II. Chap. xi.
_To ‘hitch it,’ etc._
‘Whoe’er offends at some unlucky time
Slides into verse, and hitches in a rhyme.’
Pope, _Imitations of Horace_, Satire I. Book II.
_His last letter._ _The Times_, Nov. 23, 1813.
65. _Bobadil._ Ben Jonson’s _Every Man in his Humour_ (first produced
1598).
67. ILLUSTRATIONS OF VETUS (_continued_). _The Morning Chronicle_,
Dec. 10, 1813.
_‘He is indeed,’ etc._ _The Man of Mode; or Sir Fopling Flutter_,
Act I.
‘_Fools aspiring to be knaves._’ Pope, Epilogue to the Satires, i.
165.
70. _Still true to the war—and himself._ In _The Morning Chronicle_
Hazlitt quotes, ‘Oh, no! it is an ever-fixed mark,’ etc., from
Shakespeare’s Sonnets (No. 116).
68. _Peachum._ See _The Beggar’s Opera_, Act I. Scene 1.
71. _The treaty of 1763._ The Peace of Paris, by which England kept
her conquests in America. France recognised the independence of
the States in 1778.
_‘With centric,’ etc._ _Paradise Lost_, VIII. 83.
72. _‘I will have ransom,’ etc._ _Henry V._, Act IV. Scene 4.
‘_The fierce extremes._’ _Paradise Lost_, II. 599.
73. ILLUSTRATIONS OF VETUS (_continued_). _The Morning Chronicle_,
Dec. 16, 1813.
_‘Madmen’s epistles,’ etc._ _Twelfth Night_, Act V. Scene 1.
‘_Events ... in Holland._’ The Dutch had revolted from Napoleon,
and declared for the Prince of Orange, who landed in Holland
(from England) on Nov. 27, 1813.
_Spenser’s Allegory._ _The Faerie Queene_, Book II. Canto v.
‘_Made of penetrable stuff._’ _Hamlet_, Act III. Scene 4.
‘_Leer malign._’ _Paradise Lost_, IV. 503.
74. _Vattel._ Eméric de Vattel (1714–1767), whose _Droits des Gens_
was published in 1758, and was frequently translated.
_‘Think, there’s livers out of England,’ etc._ _Cymbeline_, Act
III. Scene 4.
_Anacharsis Cloots._ For Jean Baptiste Cloots, who assumed the
name of Anacharsis, see Burke’s _Regicide Peace_ (ed. Payne),
pp. 296 _et seq._
75. _Lord Castlereagh’s Speech._ On Nov. 17, 1813. See Hansard’s
_Parl. Debates_, XXVII. 132 _et seq._
_‘Why so,’ etc._ _Macbeth_, Act III. Scene 4.
Note. _Cursory Strictures on the Charge of Chief-Justice Eyre._
See the essay on Godwin in Hazlitt’s _Spirit of the Age_.
76. ‘_To knot and gender in._’ _Othello_, Act IV. Scene 2.
‘_Mere midsummer madness._’ _Twelfth Night_, Act III. Scene 4.
_‘For in this lowest deep,’ etc._ _Paradise Lost_, IV. 76.
_The Sun and the Star._ ‘The Sun,’ a Tory evening paper founded in
1802 by George Rose. ‘The Star,’ the first London evening paper,
founded in 1788 by Peter Stuart.
77. _Political E. O. tables._ See vol. i., note to p. 145.
‘_Struggled to get free._’ _Hamlet_, Act III. Scene 3.
78. _Doctor Pedro Positive._ See _Don Quixote_, Part II. Book III.
Chaps, xlvii. and xlix.
_But we deny._ The rest of the essay from this point appeared
first in _The Morning Chronicle_ for Dec. 18, 1813.
79. _‘Like a devilish engine,’ etc._ _Paradise Lost_, IV. 17.
_‘So small a drop,’ etc._ _Cymbeline_, Act IV. Scene 2.
80. _‘The stone which the builders rejected,’ etc._ Psalms cxviii. 22.
81. _‘This large discourse of reason,’ etc._ _Hamlet_, Act IV. Scene
4.
82. _The murdered D’Enghien._ The Duc d’Enghien, eldest son of the
Prince de Condé, was executed on March 21, 1804, to avenge
Pichegru’s plot against the life of Buonaparte.
85. _‘His yoke,’ etc._ _St. Matthew_ xi. 30.
ILLUSTRATIONS OF VETUS. From _The Morning Chronicle_, Jan. 3,
1814.
_‘Take him,’ etc._ _Romeo and Juliet_, Act III. Scene 2.
_‘Our occupation,’ etc._ _Othello_, Act III. Scene 3.
_‘Aggravate his voice,’ etc._ _Midsummer Night’s Dream_, Act I.
Scene 2.
_He is not the first enthusiast, etc._ Hazlitt refers to the
well-known story of Ixion.
86. _That of Parolles._ In _The Morning Chronicle_ Hazlitt appends a
note in which he applies the reference: ‘Vetus does not relish
our quotations from the Poets. The following is, however, so
applicable, that we insert it: Parolles, “What the devil should
move me to the recovery of this drum, not being ignorant of the
possibility. Tongue, I will put you into a butter-woman’s mouth,
and buy myself another of Bajazet’s mule, if you prattle me into
these perils.” _All’s Well that Ends Well_,’ Act IV. Scene 1.
_Dr. Parr’s Spital Sermon._ Preached before the Lord Mayor on
Easter Monday, 1800, and published with notes in 1801. It
consisted chiefly of an attack on Godwin’s _Political Justice_.
See the essay on Godwin in Hazlitt’s _Spirit of the Age_, and,
for Sir James Mackintosh’s _Lectures_, the essay on Mackintosh.
_‘One of these patriots,’ etc._ These three paragraphs are far
beside the mark if they were aimed at Hazlitt, who cared little
for Godwin’s social philosophy.
87. ‘_Scrub._’ Farquhar’s _The Beaux-Stratagem_.
Note. _‘In heaven,’ etc._ _St. Matthew_, xxii. 30.
88. _‘Confound the ignorant,’ etc._ _Hamlet_, Act II. Scene 2.
89. _‘The latter end,’ etc._ ‘The latter end of his commonwealth
forgets the beginning.’ _Tempest_, Act II. Scene 1.
90. ILLUSTRATIONS OF VETUS (_concluded_). From _The Morning
Chronicle_, Jan. 5, 1814.
_‘What do you read,’ etc._ _Hamlet_, Act II. Scene 2.
90. _Don Quixote’s books._ See _Don Quixote_, Book I. chap. i.
91. _Patriotism in modern times, etc._ This passage, down to ‘broad
and firm basis,’ had already been republished by Hazlitt. See
vol. i. (_Round Table_) pp. 67–8.
92. _It was said, etc._ By Rousseau, _Emile_, Liv. iv. p. 279 (édit.
Garnier).
_‘A painted sepulchre,’ etc._ See _ante_, note to p. 34.
Note 2. _Canning’s Jaggernaut Speech._ In the debate on Foreign Treaties,
Nov. 17, 1813. See Hansard’s _Parl. Debates_, XXVII. 144–152.
93. _Tempora mollia fandi._ _Æneid_, iv. 293.
_‘Smoothing,’ etc._ ‘Smoothing the raven down of darkness till it
smiled.’ _Comus_, 251–2.
_‘Airs from heaven,’ etc._ _Hamlet_, Act I. Scene 4.
_‘Thrust us,’ etc._ _Henry IV._, Part II. Act II. Scene 1.
95. _That profound politician._ Malthus. See _ante_, pp. 356 _et seq._
96. ‘_What appetite he may._’ _Henry VIII._, Act III. Scene 2.
ON THE LATE WAR. Published in _The Champion_, April 3, 1814.
97. _‘The great statesman,’ etc._ Pitt.
_‘Their pound of carrion-flesh,’ ‘’tis theirs,’ etc._ _Merchant of
Venice_, Act IV. Scene 1.
_‘’Tis an indifferent piece of work,’ etc._ _Taming of the Shrew_,
Act I. Scene 1.
_‘Fierce as a comet,’ etc._ _Paradise Lost_, II. 708.
‘_Bear fardels._’ _Hamlet_, Act III. Scene 1.
_‘Was not,’ etc._ _Hamlet_, Act I. Scene 2.
98. _‘The pilot,’ etc._ Canning’s verses, ‘The Pilot that weathered
the storm,’ were composed for the first (1802) of the birth-day
dinners in honour of Pitt.
_Our great war-minister._ He means Pitt.
99. _Odia in longum, etc._ Tacitus, _Agricola_, I. 69.
_If Titus, etc._ See Suetonius, VIII. 8.
‘_Full circle home._’ _King Lear_, Act V. Scene 3.
‘_The child and champion of Jacobinism._’ This phrase occurred in
Coleridge’s report of Pitt’s speech of Feb. 17, 1800. See
_Essays on his own Times_ (II. 294). Mrs. Coleridge, the editor
of that work, says in a note (III. 1010): ‘It is remarkable that
the striking expression, applied to Buonaparte—“the child and
the champion of Jacobinism”—which was continually repeated
afterwards, does not occur in the speech as reported in _The
Times_, though it reappears in the later edition of it in the
collection of Pitt’s speeches.’ The words occur in Hansard. See
_Parl. Debates_, XXXIV. 1443.
_Mr. Whitebread._ Samuel Whitbread (1758–1815), the famous Whig
member.
101. PRINCE MAURICE’S PARROT. Published originally in _The
Examiner_, July 10, 1814, and later in _The Champion_, Sept. 18,
1814.
Charles Maurice Talleyrand de Périgord, Prince of Benevento, was
the representative of France at the Congress of Vienna (1814).
Castlereagh was the representative of England.
102. _‘With so little web,’ etc._ _Othello_, Act II. Scene 1.
103. _The Prince of Benevento._ Napoleon created Talleyrand a Prince of
the Empire under this title in 1806.
_The ex-Bishop of Autun._ Talleyrand was appointed Bishop of Autun
by Louis XVI. in 1789.
_His friend._ Croker.
WHETHER THE FRIENDS, _etc._ From _The Champion_, Oct. 23, 1814.
_An excellent article._ By Leigh Hunt in _The Examiner_, Oct. 16,
1814.
105. _‘Vows made in pain,’ etc._ _Paradise Lost_, IV. 97.
_‘Why so,’ etc._ _Macbeth_, Act III. Scene 4.
_‘The right divine,’ etc._ Pope’s _Dunciad_, IV. 188.
106. _‘All power,’ etc._ _St. Matthew_ xxviii. 18.
‘_The milk of human kindness._’ _Macbeth_, Act I. Scene 5.
_The Crown Prince of Sweden._ Bernadotte.
‘_All hail hereafter._’ _Macbeth_, Act I. Scene 5.
108. _The dexterous prince, etc._ Talleyrand.
_The act of Mr. Fox’s administration._ March 25, 1807.
109. _‘A very currish performance,’ etc._ _Two Gentlemen of Verona_,
Act IV. Scene 4.
_Mr. Pye’s._ Henry James Pye (1745–1813), Southey’s predecessor in
the laureateship.
110. _Mr. Croker was wrong, etc._ See _ante_, p. 48.
_Once a Jacobin, etc._ ‘This charitable adage was at one time
fashionable in the ministerial circles; and Mr. Pitt himself, in
one of his most powerful speeches, gave it every advantage, that
is derivable from stately diction.’ Coleridge, _Essays on his
own Times_, II. 542. Coleridge refers to Pitt’s speech of Feb.
17, 1800. See _ante_, note to p. 99.
_Old Sarum._ See _post_, note to p. 157.
_‘The friendship,’ etc._ _Carmen Nuptiale_, Proem, Stanza 9.
‘_Glassy essence._’ _Measure for Measure_, Act II. Scene 2.
111. _Joseph Fox or Joseph Lancaster._ Joseph Fox, a Quaker and trustee
of the Lancastrian Society. Southey was a vehement supporter of
Lancaster’s rival, Bell.
‘_Practice of Piety._’ ‘The Practice of Piety, directing a
Christian how to walk that he may please God,’ by Lewis Bayly,
Bishop of Bangor, was published early in the seventeenth
century, and became enormously popular.
112. _Geo. Fox._ George Fox (1624–1690), the founder of the Society of
Friends.
_‘Bear thou,’ etc._ _Carmen Nuptiale_, The Dream, Stanza 50.
113. _‘Yea in this now,’ etc._ _Ib._, Proem, Stanzas 9 and 10.
_As to Spenser._ Spenser received a pension of £50 a year from the
Crown in 1590–1, but was not formally poet-laureate. William
Whitehead (1715–1785) was laureate from 1757.
114. _‘Look to thy sire,’ etc._ _Carmen Nuptiale_, The Dream, Stanza
32.
THE LAY OF THE LAUREATE, _etc._ (concluded). From _The Examiner_,
July 14, 1816.
_‘Hamlet, thou hast,’ etc._ _Hamlet_, Act III. Scene 4.
115. _‘Proudly I raised,’ etc._ _Carmen Nuptiale_, Proem, Stanza 11.
_‘This lovely pair,’ etc._ _Ib._, The Dream, Stanzas 73–7.
116. ‘_Old, old Master Shallow._’ _Henry IV._, Part II., Act III. Scene
2.
_Snug’s the word._ _Midsummer Night’s Dream_, Act III. Scene 1.
_‘The wars,’ etc._ _The Faerie Queene_, Book II. Canto ix. Stanza
56.
117. ‘_Brunswick’s fated line._’ _Carmen Nuptiale_, The Dream, Stanza
30.
‘_Re-risen cause of evil._’ _Ib._, Proem, Stanza 14.
_‘Speed thou the work,’ etc._ _Ib._, The Dream, Stanza 81.
118. _The massacres of Nismes._ In July 1815, after the restoration of
the Bourbons.
119. ‘_Quite chopfallen._’ _Hamlet_, Act V. Scene 1.
_As Christopher Sly says._ _Taming of the Shrew_, Induction, Scene
2.
_The death of Porlier._ General Porlier revolted against Ferdinand
of Spain, but, being captured, was put to death in Nov. 1815.
120. _‘Que peut inspirer,’ etc._ _Athalie_, Act III. Scene 3.
Note 1. See Vol. I., note to p. 214.
Note 2. _One of them_, Leigh Hunt. _The other_, Charles Lamb. ‘A
celebrated General,’ the Duke of Wellington. George Garrard
(1760–1826) and Peter Turnerelli (1774–1839) exhibited busts at
the Royal Academy.
121. ‘_Two of the fearfullest wild-fowl living._’ _Midsummer Night’s
Dream_, Act III. Scene 1.
_A British Lion, etc._ _Carmen Nuptiale_, The Dream, Stanza 19–21.
A NEW VIEW OF SOCIETY, _etc._ _The Examiner_, Literary Notices,
No. 6., Aug. 4, 1816.
For an account of Robert Owen (1771–1858) and his schemes see
Leslie Stephen’s _English Utilitarians_, II. 119–124.
122. _‘Old, old,’ etc._ See _ante_, note to p. 116.
_My Lord Shallow._ Lord Castlereagh, presumably.
_‘Applaud him,’ etc._ _Macbeth_, Act V. Scene 3.
_‘Chaunting remnants,’ etc._ _Hamlet_, Act IV. Scene 3.
_‘No, no,’ etc._ _Ib._ Act IV. Scene 5.
‘_Like a cloud over the Caspian._’ _Paradise Lost_, II. 714–716.
_‘Thy bones,’ etc._ _Macbeth_, Act III. Scene 4.
123. _Lubber-land._ A name given in the 16th century to the imaginary
Land of Cockaigne. See Ellis, _Specimens of the Early English
Poets, I._ 95.
‘_Durham’s golden stalls._’ ‘Though placed in golden Durham’s
second stall.’ Cowper, _Truth_, 120.
_There was one head._ Hazlitt refers to George III.
_‘Thus repelled,’ etc._ _Hamlet_, Act II. Scene 2.
124. ‘_An old saw._’ _As You Like It_, Act II. Scene 7.
_‘If to do,’ etc._ _Merchant of Venice_, Act I. Scene 2.
_Two of our most loyal booksellers._ John Murray (1778–1843),
publisher of the _Quarterly_, and John Hatchard (1769–1849)
bookseller to the Queen.
_Mr. Wilberforce._ For William Wilberforce (1759–1833) see
Hazlitt’s _Spirit of the Age_.
‘_To pull an old house about their ears._’ Cf. ‘Let them pull all
about mine ears.’ _Coriolanus_, Act III. Scene 2.
125. _The Lord-Chancellor._ Eldon.
126. ‘_The good and wise._’ Southey’s _Carmen Nuptiale_, Proem, Stanza
9.
_Dr. Parr, etc._ See _ante_, p. 86.
In _The Examiner_ for Sept. 1, 1816 (Literary Notices, No. 10)
were published two letters referring to this article of
Hazlitt’s, one, signed ‘Z’ defending Owen, the other, signed ‘A.
C.,’ denying that the improvements claimed by Owen had actually
taken place at New Lanark. The letters are followed by two
columns of editorial comment which may or may not be the work of
Hazlitt.
127. _The Speech of Charles C. Western, etc._ _The Examiner_, Literary
Notices, No. 7. August 11, 1816.
Charles Callis Western (1767–1844), an Essex landowner and member
for the county. For his long services in Parliament and as a
pamphleteer on behalf of the agricultural interest and of prison
reform, he was raised to the peerage as Baron Western in 1833,
after having been defeated at the first election after the
passing of the Reform Bill. Henry Peter Brougham (1778–1868) was
at this time (1816) member for Winchelsea. See Hazlitt’s sketch
of him in _The Spirit of the Age_, and the notes thereon. He was
Lord-Chancellor from 1830–1834.
_The tale of Slaukenbergius._ _Tristram Shandy_, Vol. IV.
‘_Aye, there’s the rub._’ _Hamlet_, Act III. Scene 1.
_Lord Camden._ The son of Lord-Chancellor Camden. In 1780 he was
appointed one of the tellers of the exchequer, a post which he
held for sixty years. In 1808 the emoluments of the office
amounted to £23,000 per annum. In 1812 Camden relinquished the
income, and so before his death in 1840 had sacrificed a quarter
of a million.
128. _Mr. Horner._ Francis Horner (1778–1817), one of the founders of
the _Edinburgh Review_, and one of the chief hopes of the Whigs
in Parliament.
130. Note. _The Friend_, Section 1. Essay 7, ‘On the vulgar Errors
respecting Taxes and Taxation.’
131. Note. _‘The road had done,’ etc._ _The Beggar’s Opera_, Act
II. Scene 1.
132. _Walcheren._ Seven thousand men died during the disastrous
expedition to Walcheren.
SPEECHES IN PARLIAMENT, _etc._ (_concluded_). _The Examiner_,
Literary Notices, No. 8, Aug. 18, 1816.
_‘Come, let us,’ etc._ Swift’s _Polite Conversation_, Dialogue 1.
_‘Relieve the killing languor,’ etc._ Burke’s _Reflections on the
Revolution in France_ (_Select Works_, ed. Payne, II 120).
_‘If the poor,’ etc._ Burke, _Thoughts and Details on Scarcity_
(1795), _Works_, Bohn, V. 84.
133. _Like the dagger._ Burke’s dagger scene occurred during a debate
on the Alien Bill, Dec. 28, 1792. See _Parl. Hist._, XXX. 189.
134. _As the vapours, etc._ See p. 231.
136. _‘They toil not,’ etc._ _St. Matthew_, vi. 28.
_Like Lord Peter, in the ‘Tale of a Tub.’_ See Section 4.
138. A LAY-SERMON, _etc._ _The Examiner_, Literary Notices, No.
11, Sept. 8, 1816. Cf. Hazlitt’s sketch of Coleridge in _The
Spirit of the Age_.
_‘Function,’ etc._ _Macbeth_, Act I. Scene 3.
_‘Or in Franciscan’ etc._ _Paradise Lost_, III. 480.
_‘Omne ignotum,’ etc._ Tacitus, _Agricola_, Chap. XXX.
_Cock-Lane Ghost._ For ‘the story of a Ghost in Cock-Lane, which,
in the year 1762, had gained very general credit in London,’ see
Boswell’s _Life of Johnson_ (ed. G. B. Hill), I. 406–8, and
Lang’s _Cock-Lane and Common Sense_.
‘_A penny for his thoughts._’ An old saying embalmed in John
Heywood’s _Proverbs_ and Swift’s _Polite Conversation_
(Introduction).
139. ‘_Secret Tattle._’ Congreve’s _Love for Love_.
‘_Yet virgin of Proserpina from Jove_,’ _Paradise Lost_, IX. 396.
_The Friend, etc._ _The Friend; a literary, moral, and political
weekly Paper, excluding personal and party politics and the
events of the day_ (1809–1810), was re-issued in one volume in
1812, and with additions and alterations (rather a _rifacimento_
than a new edition), in 1818. The articles in the _Courier_ and
the _Watchman_ and the _Conciones ad Populum_ were posthumously
republished in _Essays on his own Times_ (3 vols. 1850), edited
by his daughter Sara.
_Barmecide._ _Arabian Nights’ Entertainment_, The Barber’s Story
of his Sixth Brother.
_‘He never is,’ etc._ Altered from Pope’s _Essay on Man_, I. 96.
_Marplot._ Mrs. Centlivre’s (1667?–1723), _Busy Body_ (1709).
_‘Sublime piety’ of Jordano Bruno._ See _The Friend_, Essays
Introductory, Essay 16.
140. _Damns a tragedy, etc._ See _Satyrane’s Letters_ (Biographia
Literaria, Bohn, p. 258).
_The late Mr. Howard._ John Howard (1726–1790), the prison
reformer.
_Voltaire dull._ _The Friend_, The First Landing-Place, Essay 1.
Cf. _The Round Table_, Vol. I. p. 116.
_‘Ample scope’ etc._ Gray’s _The Bard_.
141. _‘That wantons,’ etc._ _Romeo and Juliet_, Act II. Scene 6.
141. _‘Or like,’ etc._ Burns’s _Tam O’ Shanter_.
_‘Like to a man,’ etc._ _Hamlet_, Act III. Scene 3.
142. _‘Less than arch-angel’ etc._ _Paradise Lost_, I. 593–4.
_The ——._ The poet-laureate (Southey) presumably.
_‘To stand himself’ etc._ _The Beggar’s Opera_, Act I. Scene 1.
_When his six Irish friends, etc._ See _The Round Table_, Vol. i.
p. 54.
143. THE STATESMAN’S MANUAL, _etc._ _The Examiner_, Literary
Notices, No. 21, Dec. 29, 1816.
_Here is the true Simon Pure._ Mrs. Centlivre’s _A Bold Stroke for
a Wife_ (1718).
_‘And tis a kind of good deed,’ etc._ _Henry VIII._, Act III.
Scene 2.
144. ‘_Still harping on my daughter._’ _Hamlet_, Act II. Scene 2.
146. _The impertinent barber, etc._ _The Thousand and One Nights_, The
Story told by the Tailor.
_‘And the time that Solomon reigned’ etc._ See I _Kings_ xi. 42–3,
and xii. 1–20.
Note. In _The Examiner_ this note continued: ‘Hypocrisy does not
relate to the degree of success with which a man imposes on
himself, but on the motives which make him attempt it. The
greatest hypocrites are those who can impose most successfully
on themselves, that is, conceal from their own minds their
sinister motives for judging, or suppress their real,
_under_-opinions. We think it a piece of hypocrisy for a man to
insinuate, after reading this part of the Bible, that that
Manual of the Statesman is favourable to the doctrine of Divine
Right.’
147. _‘Imposture,’ etc._ Quoted from Coleridge’s _Statesman’s Manual_.
148. _Burs and kecksies._ _Henry V._, Act V. Scene 2.
_A Colquhoun._ Patrick Colquhoun (1745–1820), London Police
magistrate and social reformer, author of _A Treatise on the
Police of the Metropolis_ (1795).
‘_Oh thou particular fellow._’ _Henry VI._, Part II. Act IV. Scene
2.
‘_Secret Tattle._’ See _ante_, note to p. 139.
149. _We well remember, etc._ See Hazlitt’s Essay, ‘My First
Acquaintance with Poets,’ from which it appears that it was
Coleridge himself who made the remark about Thomson. The
‘solitary ale-house’ was at the Valley of Rocks near Lynton.
_Mr. Southey’s ‘Tract on the Madras System.’_ An article of
Southey’s in the _Quarterly Review_ for October 1811, reprinted
as ‘Origin, Nature, and Object of the New System of Education.’
Hazlitt has in mind a note of Coleridge’s in the _Lay Sermon_
(Bell’s edition, p. 328), where he says, ‘See Mr. Southey’s
tract on the new or Madras system of education: especially
towards the conclusion, where with exquisite humour as well as
with his usual poignancy of wit he has detailed Joseph
Lancaster’s disciplinarian inventions,’ etc. For an account of
the Madras system of education and of the warfare between Joseph
Lancaster (1770–1838) and Andrew Bell (1753–1832), and between
their respective followers, see Leslie Stephen’s _The English
Utilitarians_, II. 17 _et seq._
_The late African expedition._ Lord Exmouth’s successful
bombardment of Algiers in August 1816.
152. MR. COLERIDGE’S LAY-SERMON. This letter is the germ of the
well-known essay entitled ‘My First Acquaintance with Poets,’
which Hazlitt afterwards contributed to the third number of
Leigh Hunt’s short-lived review _The Liberal: Verse and Prose
from the South_. The present letter (except the two last
paragraphs) was repeated in the essay which was first
republished in _Literary Remains_ (1836).
152. _‘Il y a des impressions,’ etc._ A favourite quotation from
Rousseau’s _Confessions_.
_His text._ _St. John_ vi. 15.
_‘Rose like a steam,’ etc._ _Comus_, l. 556.
_‘Of one crying,’ etc._ _St. Matthew_ iii. 3–4.
153. _‘Such were the notes,’ etc._ Pope’s _Epistle to Robert, Earl of
Oxford_, l. 1.
_‘Like to that sanguine flower,’ etc._ _Lycidas_, l. 106.
_Like Timon._ _Timon of Athens_, Act III. Scene 6.
Note.—‘The Correspondent; consisting of letters, moral, political,
and literary, between eminent writers in France and England.’
The English articles were arranged by Dr. Stoddart.
154. _Bonaparte and Müller._ This fragment appeared in _The Examiner_
on Dec. 15, 1816. Johannes von Müller (1752–1809) was introduced
to Napoleon after the battle of Jena (1806). His collected works
appeared in 27 vols. (1800–1817).
155. ILLUSTRATIONS OF THE TIMES NEWSPAPER. _The Examiner_,
Literary Notices, No. 19, Dec. 15, 1816.
_‘Out of these convertites,’ etc._ _As You Like It_, Act V. Scene
4.
‘_All honourable men._’ _Julius Caesar_, Act III. Scene 2.
_‘But all is conscience,’ etc._ Chaucer, _Prologue_, 150.
156. _The Recruiting Officer._ Farquhar’s _The Recruiting Officer_, Act
I. Scene 1.
_Miss Lucy Lockitt._ _The Beggar’s Opera_, Act II.
157. _Here comes one of them._ Wordsworth. Hazlitt perhaps refers to a
conversation with Wordsworth at Alfoxden, though that must have
been in 1798, not 1800.
_A Sonnet to the King._ The Sonnet (entitled ‘November 1813’)
beginning ‘Now that all hearts are glad,’ etc.
_‘Such recantation,’ etc._ _The Excursion_, Book III.
_‘Proud Glaramara,’ etc._ Wordsworth, _To Joanna_.
_Sir Robert Wilson’s gallant conduct._ In assisting Lavalette to
escape from Paris on Jan. 10, 1816. Wilson and two others,
Captain Hutchinson and Mr. Bruce, were tried in Paris and
sentenced to three months’ imprisonment.
_Joan of Arc._ Published in 1796. The first edition contained in
Book II. some lines by Coleridge which were afterwards
published, with additions, as _The Destiny of Nations_ in
_Sibylline Leaves_ (1817). Southey refers to the poem
(Preface, 1837) as ‘crudely conceived, rashly prefaced, and
prematurely hurried into the world.’ _The Examiner_ in 1816
published a selection of ‘Specimens of Early Jacobin Poetry,’
entitled ‘Acanthologia.’ One of these (Aug. 25, 1816) was the
‘Inscription for a Monument at Old Sarum,’ with a motto from the
_Quarterly Review_, ‘A Reformer is worse than a housebreaker.’
_Fire, Famine and Slaughter._ First published in _The Morning
Post_ (Jan. 8, 1798) and republished in _Sibylline Leaves_
(1817) with an apologetic preface. Gale and Fenner, publishers
of the _Statesman’s Manual_, carried on business in Paternoster
Row.
_‘Whose grief,’ etc._ _Hamlet_, Act V. Scene 1.
158. _The editor of ‘The Times.’_ Dr. Stoddart.
_King Cambyses’ vein._ _Henry IV._, Part I. Act II. Scene 4.
‘_Horrors on horror’s head accumulating._’ _Othello_, Act III.
Scene 3.
_Mr. Koenig’s new press._ The steam printing-press of Frederick
Koenig was adopted by _The Times_ in 1814, the number for Nov.
29 containing the announcement that ‘our journal of this day
presents to the public the practical result of the greatest
improvement connected with printing since the discovery of the
art itself,’ See Fox Bourne’s _English Newspapers_, I. 356.
158. _Dr. Slop’s curse._ This name was frequently applied to Stoddart
after he had become editor of _The New Times_. In 1820 William
Hone published a burlesque on _The New Times_, entitled ‘A Slap
at Slop.’
_The roasting of Protestants._ At Nismes. See _ante_, p. 118.
_Lord Castlereagh’s Letter to Mon Prince._ A letter from
Castlereagh, dated Vienna, 11th October 1814, addressed to
Prince Hardenberg, the representative of Prussia at the Vienna
Congress, in which Castlereagh states that he can raise no
objection to the incorporation of Saxony with the Prussian
monarchy. The letter provoked much comment in the press during
the following year and was referred to in the House of Commons
(April 10, 1815).
159. _Like Perillus’s bull._ The bronze bull made for Phalaris by
Perillus, who was himself its first victim:—
‘Thus Phalaris Perillus taught to low,
And made him season first the brazen cow.
A rightful doom, the laws of nature cry,
’Tis, the artificers of death should die.’
Dryden, Ovid’s _Art of Love_, I. 737–40.
‘_His most sweet voice._’ _Coriolanus_, Act II. Scene 3.
_Mr. Walter._ John Walter the Second (1776–1847), son of the
founder of _The Times_, who died in 1812.
_‘Thy stone,’ etc._ Pope, _Ode on St. Cecilia’s Day_, 66–7.
‘_Once a Jacobin always a Jacobin._’ Coleridge contributed an
article under this heading to _The Morning Post_ (_Essays on his
own Times_, II. 542), in which he stated that Pitt in one of his
most powerful speeches (Feb. 17, 1800) had given the adage
‘every advantage that is derivable from stately diction.’
According to Coleridge’s own report (_Essay on his own Times_,
II. 295) Pitt said: ‘The mind once tainted with Jacobinism can
never be wholly free from the taint; I know no means of
purification; when it does not break out on the surface, it
still lurks in the vitals; no antidote can approach the subtlety
of the venom, no length of quarantine secure us against the
obstinacy of the pestilence.’ See _ante_, note to p. 110.
160. ‘_What’s Hecuba to him or he to Hecuba._’ For this and the two
succeeding quotations see _Hamlet_, Act II. Scene 2.
_That unfortunate Miss Bailey._ George Colman the Younger’s _Love
Laughs at Locksmiths_, Act II.
_‘Society became,’ etc._ Wordsworth, _The Excursion_, Book III.
161. _Proof against conviction._ In _The Examiner_ this paragraph was
succeeded by the following passage:—‘What a pity he is not a
poet or a man of genius! (Your dull fellows ought to be honest;
for every body ought to be something.) He might then instead of
wholesome truths have given us agreeable lies; for plain facts,
pompous fictions; he might have strewed the flowers of poetry on
the rotten carcase of corruption, and have made the ugly face of
war look amiable at a distance. He might have trumped up a
romantic episode about the Duchess d’Angouleme,[68] as Mr. Burke
did about her wretched mother, or have seen visions on the
mountain tops like Mr. Wordsworth, or have dreamt a dream more
in the manner of Spenser than The Laureat’s Lay. There might
then have been something like an observation, a thought, a
trope, a jest, a lucky epithet, a well written sentence, in all
the long, dreary, heavy columns of _The Times_ newspaper. But as
our author cannot soar, he grovels; and no one ever sunk so low.
He is a perfect Grub-street. His want of eloquence renders him
abusive; he has no power over _words_, or he would not call
_names_ at the rate he does. He throws dirt and rubbish at the
heads of his adversaries, because he can get nothing else to
throw. Do you think he would go on for ever with that round of
slang-phrases, dreadful to the ear, and petrific even to behold;
monstrous, prodigious, unutterable, without argument, without
sense or decency, calculated only to stupify or disgust, with
which he piles up the columns of _The Times_ newspaper, if he
had any resources either of imagination or understanding? It is
the want of power equal to his will, that inflames his malice
and inflates his style; he makes up for what he wants in
strength, by coarseness; for what he wants in variety, by
repetition; for what he wants in sallies of wit, by systematic
dulness; for what he wants in reason, by brutal outrage. And
then, did any mortal ever read such a style? The flowers of
Billingsgate, arranged according to the rules of Lindley
Murray’s English Exercises, with all the ridiculous pedantry of
subjunctive moods and adverbial expletives:
“In many a winding bout
Of linked dulness long drawn-out.”[69]
It is as if the celebrated pastry-cook in Cornhill[70] should get
cart-loads of mud to do up in twelfth cakes, with cuts of kings,
queens, and bishops, for his Christmas customers. All that is
low in understanding, vulgar and sordid in principle in city
politics, is seen exuding from the formal jaws of _The Times_
newspaper, as we see the filth, and slime, and garbage, and
offal of this great city pouring into the Thames, from the
sewers and conduit-pipes of the scavenger’s company. It is a
patent water-closet for the dirty uses of legitimacy: a leaden
cistern for obsolete prejudices and upstart sophistry “to knot
and gender in.”[71] Is this an exaggerated account? No. We have
not words to do justice to the subject. _The Times_ newspaper is
a phenomenon without any parallel in history: it is the triumph
of the reign of George III. It is supposed to be the organ of
the Stock Exchange politics; and, to be sure, there is a
wonderful sympathy between them. Neither Burke nor Junius would
have done so well. There is nothing in the pages of _The Times_
that can lose in loftiness or elegance by repetition in the
money-market, or draw off the attention of the bulls and bears
from their ledgers, or their soups and venison. The vulgarity of
the Editor’s style might even receive a romantic tincture from
the Hebraism of its pronunciation, and its monotony would
be agreeably relieved by the discordant gabble of that
disinterested congregation of stock-jobbing Jews and Gentiles.
The secret of the composition of _The Times_ is this. The city
wants a bugbear to suit their interest, and the Editor of the
city paper creates a bugbear out of his malice. He nicknames
this bugbear, but as he does not believe in it, he repeats his
nickname ten or a dozen times every day, till by so doing he
begins to believe it. They begin to believe it too; and the echo
and buz of the Stock Exchange gives him courage to go on. He
then tries other and more odious nicknames, which he and others
believe, not because they are true, but because they are odious,
and gratify the malice of the writer, and answer the readers’
ends. Thus the city and the city Editor go on hand in hand,
creating a bugbear out of nothing, and swelling it into a
monster, heaping all sorts of vices and deformities upon it, and
believing them all, in proportion as they are incredible and
contradictory—if they are disproved, repeating them the
louder—making the disgust, fear and hatred, which their bugbear
inspires, a proof of its existence, and determined more
and more to indulge their disgust, fear and hatred, in
proportion as their passions and prejudices have no other
foundation than their own spite and credulity—drowning reason
in passion—overcoming common sense, by shocking common
decency—believing in the chimeras of their own brain, from their
very hideousness, as children put faith in apparitions, in
proportion to their dread of them—ringing everlastingly in each
other’s ears, what they each wish to believe; and believing that
there is some reason for the everlasting din and noise they
make, because they make it—creating a war-bugbear, because they
wanted something to go to war with, requiring the same wanton
and unprincipled sacrifices of the blood and treasure of their
country to be made to this phantom of their own making, as to
the direst necessity; and persisting in the justice and wisdom
of their measures, from the very miseries which these helpmates
of the Bourbons have brought upon the world—to gratify the
mercantile avarice of the Stock Exchange and the literary vanity
of its tool, the Editor of _The Times_. The interest of the
Stock Exchange, and the philosophy of the Editor of _The Times_,
no longer, however, draw the same way and we suspect they will
soon dissolve partnership. Such writers do their country best
service in the end; “kept like an apple in the jaw of an ape,
first mouthed, and last swallowed: it is but squeezing them, and
spunge, you shall be dry again.”[72]
161. ILLUSTRATIONS, _etc._ ON MODERN LAWYERS AND POETS. _The
Examiner_, Literary Notices, No. 20, Dec. 22, 1816.
_Facilis, etc._ _Æneid_, VI. 126 _et seq._
_‘Let no man,’ etc._ _Merchant of Venice_, Act II. Scene 9.
162 _Sam Sharpset._ In Thomas Morton’s (1764?–1838) _The Slave_,
acted at Covent Garden, Nov. 12, 1816.
_‘The Devil,’ etc._ _Hamlet_, Act II. Scene 2.
_‘Britain’s warriors,’ etc._
‘Of Britain’s Court ... a proud assemblage there,
Her Statesmen, and her Warriors, and her Fair.’
Southey, _Carmen Nuptiale_, The Dream, Stanza 16.
163. _‘Ours is an honest employment,’ etc._ _Beggar’s Opera_, Act I.
Scene 1.
_If he finds it in his retainer._ In _The Examiner_ Hazlitt adds
in a parenthesis, ‘See the State Trials for 1794.’ Edward Law
(1750–1818), created Lord Ellenborough and Lord Chief Justice of
England in 1802, was one of the counsel for the Crown against
Hardy and Horne Tooke in 1794.
‘_Look on both indifferently._’ Julius Caesar, Act I. Scene 2.
164. _Garrow._ See note to Vol. II. p. 186.
165. ‘_The lodged hatred._’ _Merchant of Venice_, Act I. Scene 4.
_Marshal Ney._ Ney was shot on Dec. 7, 1815.
_The declaration of the 25th of March._ Hazlitt refers to the
Declaration of the Allied Powers (Vienna, 13th March, 1815)
which proclaimed that Buonaparte by returning from Elba, had
‘placed himself without the pale of civil and social relations.’
165. _‘With famine,’ etc._ _Henry V._, Act I. Chorus.
166. _‘My soul,’ etc._ Goldsmith, _The Traveller_, 165.
‘_Carnage was the daughter of Humanity._’ See note to Vol. I. 214.
_Pantisocracy’s equal hills._ Pantisocracy, defined by Southey as
‘the equal government of all,’ was to have been carried into
practice in America by Southey, and Coleridge, and others, but
Southey abandoned the scheme. See Mrs. Sandford’s _Thomas Poole
and his Friends_.
_The spirit of poetry, etc._ Hazlitt published this paragraph in
_The Round Table_. See Vol. I. pp. 151–3, and notes.
‘_Constrained by mastery._’
‘That Love will not submit to be controlled
By mastery.’
Wordsworth, _The Excursion_, Book VI.
‘_Heaven’s own tinct._’ _Cymbeline_, Act II. Scene 2.
_‘Being so majestical,’ etc._ _Hamlet_, Act I. Scene 1.
168. ‘_No figures nor no fantasies._’ _Julius Caesar_, Act II. Scene 1.
‘_No trivial fond records._’ _Hamlet_, Act I. Scene 5.
_‘The bare earth,’ etc._
‘To the bare trees, and mountains bare,
And grass in the green field.’
Wordsworth, _To my Sister_.
169. ‘THE TIMES’ NEWSPAPER, _etc._ _The Examiner_, Literary
Notices, No. 22, Jan. 12. 1817.
_‘Doubtless the pleasure,’ etc._ Butler’s _Hudibras_, Canto iii.
_We some time ago, etc._ See _ante_, pp. 121–7.
_What we said about Coriolanus._ Hazlitt refers to a theatrical
criticism of his own which appeared in _The Examiner_ on Dec.
15, 1816, and was reprinted in _A View of the English Stage_,
and also (with a few variations) in _Characters of Shakespeare’s
Plays_. See Vol. I. of the present edition, pp. 214 _et seq._
‘_Bore through its castle walls._’ _Richard II._, Act III. Scene
2.
_In the year 1792._ Burke’s pensions were granted in 1794. Paine’s
trial took place in Dec. 1792, after he had escaped to Paris.
170. _‘Oh, name him not,’ etc._ _Julius Caesar_, Act II. Scene 1.
171. ‘_Empty praise or solid pudding._’ Pope’s _Dunciad_, I. 52.
_Companions of Ulysses._ ‘He [Buonaparte] dispersed the
_Compagnons du Lys_, as Ulysses slew the suitors.’ Hazlitt’s
_Life of Napoleon_, Chap. liii.
172. Note 1. _James Madison._ President of the United States during the war
with England, 1812–1814.
_Tom Jones._ Book I. Chaps, x.–xiii.
175. _Omne tulit punctum._ Horace, _Ars Poetica_, 343.
_The last of these props, etc._ Stoddart left _The Times_ at the
beginning of 1817. The following passage in _The Examiner_ is
omitted from the essay as republished: ‘It was to force this
living image of kingly power, this wretched mockery of divine
right, this spurious offspring of the foul blatant Beast, back
on the French that has been the cause, the end and origin, of
all this mischief: and it was for having kept it in check for so
many years by his valour and genius, for having put a hook in
its nostrils, and made it lower its grisly crest, and cease its
horrid roar, and retire to its obscure, obscene den, that
Buonaparte was nicknamed by the two celebrated persons
above-mentioned ‘the enemy of the human race’; and if instead of
packing off Louis the Desired from Hartwell, we had sent over
that idol of eastern temples the _Boa Constrictor_ from
Piccadilly, on the same proud errand, decorated with the symbols
of the Universe and of Ancient Wisdom, instead of Lilies and San
Benitos, we can see no possible reason why John Bull and the
French people might not have been equally satisfied: nor what
should have hindered Mr. Southey from adapting one of Wesley’s
hymns to the occasion, or Mr. Wordsworth from mouthing out some
deep no-meaning about “royal fortitude,” and “time-hallowed
laws,” or Mr. Coleridge from proving that the Serpent was the
more ancient and sacred symbol of the two.’
‘_In contempt of the will of the people._’ Burke, _Reflections on
the Revolution in France_ (_Select Works_, ed. Payne, II. 17).
176. _Odia in longum, etc._ Tacitus, _Annals_, I. 69.
_Three poets._ Wordsworth, Southey, and Coleridge.
177. INTERESTING FACTS, _etc._ _The Examiner_, Literary Notices,
No. 23, Feb. 2, 1817.
_‘Come draw the curtain,’ etc._ _Twelfth Night_, Act I. Scene 5.
‘_The dark blanket._’ _Macbeth_, Act I. Scene 5.
‘_Pah! and smells so._’ _Hamlet_, Act V. Scene 1.
_‘That harlot old,’ etc._ See _ante_, note to p. 36.
‘_Sweet thunder._’ _Midsummer Night’s Dream_, Act IV. Scene 1.
178. _‘She has changed,’ etc._ _Henry VI._, Part II., Act III. Scene 2.
_‘Dressed in a robe,’ etc._ ‘A fair hot wench in flame-coloured
taffeta.’ _Henry IV._, Part I., Act I. Scene 2.
_‘Stand now,’ etc._ Hazlitt quotes sundry scriptural denunciations
of Babylon. See _Isaiah_, chap, xlvii., and _Revelations_, chap.
xvii.
‘_The uses of legitimacy._’ Cf. ‘Sweet are the uses of adversity.’
_As You Like It_, Act II. Scene 1.
179. _Lord William Bentinck._ Lord William Cavendish Bentinck
(1774–1839), afterwards Governor-General of India, went in 1811
to Sicily as envoy and commander-in-chief of the British forces.
In 1814 he commanded an expedition against Genoa.
180. _Sir Robert Wilson._ Sir Robert Thomas Wilson (1777–1849), who,
after a stormy life, was appointed Governor of Gibraltar, was at
this time with the Austrian army in Italy.
_‘How little knew’st thou,’ etc._ Rowe’s _The Fair Penitent_, Act
IV. Scene 1.
_‘You have in part redeemed your errors,’ etc._ The reference is
probably to Wilson’s share in the escape of Lavalette. See
_ante_, p. 157.
_The immortal Congress._ Bentinck had issued a declaration at
Genoa promising independence to that city and the support of
England in effecting the unity of Italy, but the declaration was
disavowed by Castlereagh at the Vienna Congress.
181. _The Duke of Levis._ François, Duc de Levis (1720–87), created
Marshal of France in 1783 and Duc in 1784, fought against
England in the American War.
183. INTERESTING FACTS, _etc._ (concluded). _The Examiner_,
Literary Notices, No. 24, Feb. 9, 1817.
186. _We are glad the Duke is not an Englishman._ In _The Examiner_
Hazlitt wrote, ‘Is not the Duke an Irishman?’
192. _The fool in Lear._ See Act II. Scene 4.
_Berthier._ Louis Alexandre Berthier (1753–1815), one of
Napoleon’s marshals, who committed suicide or was murdered at
Bamberg, in Bavaria, on June 1, 1815.
192. ‘_A master-leaver, and a fugitive._’ _Antony and Cleopatra_, Act
IV. Scene 9.
WAT TYLER; A DRAMATIC POEM, _etc._ _The Examiner_, Literary
Notices, No. 25, March 9, 1817.
_Wat Tyler; a Drama_, which Southey had written ‘in the course of
three mornings in 1794,’ was surreptitiously published in 1817,
with a Preface suitable to recent circumstances, and an
injunction to restrain the publication was refused by Lord Eldon
on the ground of the mischievous tendency of the work. Southey
defended himself from the charge of inconsistency in _A Letter
to William Smith, M.P._ See _ante_, pp. 210–232. He himself
published the Drama in the 1837 edition of his Poems, in order,
as he says, ‘that it may not be supposed I think it any reproach
to have written it, or that I am more ashamed of having been a
republican, than of having been a boy.’
_‘So was it,’ etc._ Wordsworth’s ‘_My heart leaps up._’
193. _The Article on Parliamentary Reform._ Republished in
_Essays, Moral and Political_, I. 327 _et seq._
‘_Fierce extremes._’ _Paradise Lost_, II. 599.
‘_Present ignorant thought._’ Cf.—
‘Thy letters have transported me beyond
This ignorant present.’
_Macbeth_, Act I. Scene 5.
_‘Discourse of reason,’ etc._ _Hamlet_, Act I. Scene 2 and Act IV.
Scene 4.
_The woman that deliberates is lost._ Addison’s _Cato_, Act IV.
Scene 1.
_‘His poor virtue,’ etc._ _Henry IV._, Part II., Act II. Scene 4.
194. _John Ball._ John Ball, the preacher of social equality, was
executed in 1381 for his share in Tyler’s rebellion. See Burke’s
account of ‘that reverend patriarch of sedition’ in _An Appeal
from the New to the Old Whigs_ (_Works_, Bohn, III. 88), and
William Morris’s _A Dream of John Ball_ (1888) for the view of a
modern disciple.
‘_A sort of squint._’ Cf. _A Letter to William Gifford_, vol. I.
p. 379.
_Morceau I._ _Wat Tyler_, Act I.
‘_Privileg’d r——s._’ ‘Ruffians’ in the 1837 edition.
195. _Morceau II._ Act I.
196. _Morceau III._ Act I.
_Morceau IV._ Act II. Scene 1.
_‘When Adam delv’d,’ etc._ The text of John Ball’s famous sermon.
‘Of this sapient maxim, however,’ says Burke, ‘I do not give him
for the inventor. It seems to have been handed down by
tradition, and had certainly become proverbial.’
197. _Morceau V._ Act II. Scene 1.
198. _Morceau VI._ Act II. Scene 3.
199. _Morceau VII._ Act III. Scene 1.
200. _Morceau the Last._ Act III. Scene 2.
THE COURIER, ETC. From _The Examiner_, March 30, 1817.
_‘Doth not the appetite alter,’ etc._ _Much Ado about Nothing_,
Act II. Scene 3.
_In the Courier._ Coleridge wrote two letters in _The Courier_
(March 17, 18, 1817) and two letters for the _Westminster
Review_ (which were not printed there) vindicating Southey from
the charge of apostacy. All these letters were reprinted in
_Essays on his own Times_, pp. 939–962. See J. D. Campbell’s
_Samuel Taylor Coleridge_, p. 230.
201. ‘_Somewhat smacks._’ _Merchant of Venice_, Act II. Scene 2.
_The Editor of this Paper._ Leigh Hunt.
203. ‘_The Man of Humanity._’ The reference is to Canning’s and Frere’s
well-known parody of Southey, ‘The Friend of Humanity and the
Knife-Grinder.’
_‘This, this,’ etc._ _Julius Caesar_, Act III. Scene 2.
_‘That the law,’ etc._ Wordsworth, _The Excursion_, Book IV.
204. _His Irish pension._ Southey was for a short time (1800–1) private
secretary to Isaac Corry, the Chancellor of the Irish Exchequer.
205. _His Joan of Arc._ _Joan of Arc_ was published in 1796, the
Sonnets, etc., in 1797 and 1801, _Letters written during a short
residence in Spain and Portugal_ in 1797, the _Annual Anthology_
in 1799–1800.
_The Fall of Robespierre._ _The Fall of Robespierre: An Historic
Drama._ _By S. T. Coleridge, of Jesus College, Cambridge._
Published at Cambridge in 1794. Southey wrote Acts II. and III.
_All that Mr. Coleridge ever did in poetry._ _The Ancient Mariner_
appeared in _Lyrical Ballads_ (1798); _Christabel_, written at
various times between 1797 and 1800, was not published till
1816, though Wordsworth had at first intended to include it in
the _Lyrical Ballads_ of 1800; _The Three Graves_, written
between 1797 and 1809, was published in _Sibylline Leaves_
(1817); a volume of _Poems_ appeared in 1796 (2nd edit. 1797);
and _Remorse, A Tragedy in Five Acts_, written in 1797, was
published in 1813.
206. _With a single exception._ Hazlitt presumably refers to Scott.
_‘Their lofty,’ etc._ Coleridge, _Essays on his own Times_, iii.
948.
_‘Left behind by him,’ etc._ _Ib._ p. 945.
_‘Tuning his mystic harp,’ etc._
‘Coleridge and Southey, Lloyd and Lamb and Co.,
Tune all your mystic harps to praise Lepaux.’
Canning’s _The New Morality_ in _The Anti-Jacobin_.
‘_Quiring to the young-eyed cherubins._’ _Merchant of Venice_, Act
V. Scene 1.
207. _‘Every moment brings,’ etc._ _Wat Tyler_, Act II. Scene 2.
208. _‘Is not poetry, etc._ _As You Like It_, Act III. Scene 3.
_‘Constant chastity,’ etc._ Spenser, _Epithalamion_, 191–3.
209. _‘Through the allegiance,’ etc._ Spenser, _The Faerie Queene_,
Book I. Canto iii. St. 1.
‘_Rapes and ravishments._’ _All’s Well that Ends Well_, Act IV.
Scene 3.
‘_Exaggerated evils._’ Coleridge says that the speeches in _Wat
Tyler_ were intended ‘as exaggerated truths characteristic of
heated minds.’
_‘Horrible shadows,’ etc._ _Macbeth_, Act III. Scene 4.
_‘Within the book,’ etc._ _Hamlet_, Act I. Scene 5.
_Herodias’s daughter._ _St. Matthew_ xiv. 6–8.
_‘No speculation,’ etc._ _Macbeth_, Act III. Scene 4.
210. ‘_Come, let me clutch thee._’ _Ib._ Act II. Scene 1.
‘_Tickling commodity._’ ‘That smooth-faced gentleman, tickling
Commodity. _King John_, Act II. Scene 1.
_‘The chief dread,’ etc._ This phrase is from the second of
Coleridge’s _Courier_ articles on _Wat Tyler_.
A LETTER TO WILLIAM SMITH, ETC. _The Examiner_, Literary Notices,
No. 27, May 4, 1817. Southey’s Letter was included in his
_Essays Moral and Political_ (vol. II. pp. 3–31), to which
reference should be made.
_Mr. Burke’s celebrated ‘Letter,’ etc._ ‘A letter from the Right
Hon. Edmund Burke, to a noble Lord on the attacks made upon him
and his pension, in the House of Lords, by the Duke of Bedford
and the Earl of Lauderdale, early in the present session of
Parliament. 1796.’ (_Works_, Bohn, V. 110–151.)
210. _The Abbé Sieyes’s pigeon-holes._ Burke’s _Letter_, p. 142.
211. ‘_A swan-like end._’ _Merchant of Venice_, Act III. Scene 2.
_‘The ruling passion,’ etc._ Varied from Pope’s _Moral Essays_, i.
178–9.
_‘There is,’ etc._ _St. Matthew_ v. 48.
212. _‘As fortune,’ etc._ _Measure for Measure_, Act II. Scene 1.
_‘I, Robert Shallow,’ etc._ ‘He shall not abuse Robert Shallow,
esquire.’ _The Merry Wives of Windsor_, Act I. Scene 1.
_Spencean._ The ‘Spencean Philanthropists,’ who took their
name from Thomas Spence (1750–1814), advocated a form of
land-nationalisation, and included among them the Spa-fields
rioters. See Harriet Martineau’s _History of the Peace_
(Bell), I. 81–88. ‘Ex-Spencean’ appears to be a pun of Sir
Francis Burdett’s. The word was applied by him to the
ministers ‘who had got possession of the purse of the
people.’ Debate in the House of Commons, Feb. 24, 1817.
_‘To know my deed,’ etc._ _Macbeth_, Act II. Scene 2.
‘_Blind with the pin and web._’ _Winter’s Tale_, Act I. Scene 2.
213. _‘Dost thou think,’ etc._ _Twelfth Night_, Act II. Scene 3.
_Mr. Alderman Smith._ Mr. Alderman Joshua Jonathan Smith, when
sitting in Quarter Sessions to hear an application for a licence
to hold meetings, said: ‘The object of the Act is to put down
all political debate whatever.’ See _The Examiner_, April 27,
1817.
_Mr. Wynne_. Charles Watkin Williams Wynn (1775–1850), who
allowed Southey £160 per annum from 1796 to 1807. He sat for
Montgomeryshire from 1799 till his death, and successively
held sundry subordinate offices. His elder brother and he were
known as Bubble and Squeak, and when he was proposed for the
Speakership in 1817, Canning feared that members might be
tempted to call him ‘Mr. Squeaker.’
_Mr. Canning’s want of regularity._ During the Debate on the
Address, Jan. 29, 1817.
214. _‘In the third tier,’ etc._ See _ante_, p. 150.
_The person who published ‘Wat Tyler.’_ The publishers were
Sherwood, Neely and Jones.
215. _‘Upon his brow,’ etc._ _Romeo and Juliet_, Act III. Scene 2.
217. _‘Found him poor,’ etc._ Goldsmith’s _Deserted Village_, l. 414.
_‘Be to her faults,’ etc._ Prior’s _An English Padlock_.
218. _‘What’s here,’ etc._ _Timon of Athens_, Act IV. Scene 3.
A LETTER TO WILLIAM SMITH, ESQ., _etc._ (_continued_). _The
Examiner_, Literary Notices, No. 27, May 11, 1817.
_‘What word,’ etc._ _Paradise Lost_, IX. 1144.
‘_Mark you his absolute John._’ ‘Mark you his absolute “shall”?’
_Coriolanus_, Act III. Scene 1.
_The Commander-in-Chief._ The Duke of York retired in 1809 in
consequence of the disclosures made in the House of Commons.
Mrs. Clarke made use of her influence with the Duke to obtain
promotion for officers who paid her for her assistance. The Duke
was re-instated in 1811.
‘_The reading rabble._’ Hazlitt is probably referring to
Coleridge’s contemptuous passage on ‘The Reading Public.’ See
_ante_, pp. 149–150.
_Roderic Random._ See Chap. xxxiv.
_An exalted Personage._ The Prince Regent.
219. ‘_As pure as sin with baptism._’ _Henry V._, Act I. Scene 2.
_‘The collusion,’ etc._ _Love’s Labour’s Lost_, Act IV. Scene 2.
_Mr. Gifford._ See Vol. I. p. 456.
_‘The lovely Marcia,’ etc._ Addison’s _Cato_, Act I. Scene 4.
220. _The Inscription at Chepstow Castle._ This Inscription of
Southey’s in honour of the regicide Henry Martin was parodied by
Canning and Frere in the _Anti-Jacobin_ in the famous
‘Inscription for the door of the cell at Newgate, where Mrs.
Brownrigg, the ‘Prentice-cide was confined previous to her
execution.’
221. _Irritabile genus vatum._ Horace, _Epistles_, ii. 2, 102.
_The last Quarterly._ See Southey’s _Essays, Moral and Political_,
Essay VII. He defines Sir Richard Phillips as ‘Knight and
Ex-Sheriff, Buonapartist, Member of the Society for Abolishing
War, Pythagorean, and Spencean Philanthropist.’
_‘Why man,’ etc._ _Julius Caesar_, Act I. Scene 2.
_Has overlaid the posthumous birth of the young Shiloh._ The
reference is to Joanna Southcott. See _post_, note to p. 297.
224. _Like Mr. Cobbett._ Cobbett had been in Newgate for two years
(1810–1812) and fined £1000 for an article on military flogging,
and had recently (March, 1817) been obliged to leave England
from the fear of a second imprisonment.
A LETTER TO WILLIAM SMITH, ESQ., _etc._ (_concluded_). _The
Examiner_, Literary Notices, No. 28, May 18, 1817.
225. _The Monthly._ Established in 1796 by Richard (afterwards Sir
Richard) Phillips, the vegetarian publisher. See Vol. II. p.
177.
_‘The hour when I escap’d,’ etc._ Beattie, _The Minstrel_, Stanza
40.
_Doctors Price and Priestley._ Richard Price (1723–1791), whose
sermon on Nov. 4, 1789 is so violently attacked by Burke in his
_Reflections on the Revolution in France_, and Joseph Priestley
(1733–1804) were Unitarians, ‘hot men’ as Burke called them.
They figure together in a note of Boswell’s (_Life of Johnson_,
ed. G. B. Hill, IV. 238).
226. _Don Giovanni._ _Don Juan_ had been given at the King’s
Theatre on April 12, 1817. See Hazlitt’s _Dramatic Essays_.
_‘Damn you,’ etc._ _The Rivals_, Act II. Scene 1.
227. _‘For a man,’ etc._ This line from _Hamlet_ (Act V. Scene 2)
formed the motto to _The Spirit of the Age_.
_‘Children and champions,’ etc._ See _ante_, p. 99.
_‘A consummation,’ etc._ _Hamlet_, Act III. Scene 1.
‘_O fool, fool, fool._’ _Twelfth Night_, Act IV. Scene 2.
228. _Half Luddite._ The Luddites, bands of workmen who destroyed
machinery, chiefly in the Midlands, had shown their greatest
activity in the preceding year, 1816.
229. _In his speech from the Throne._ On Jan. 28, 1817, Regent said
that the Estimates ‘had been formed upon a full consideration of
all the present circumstances of the country, with an anxious
desire to make every reduction in our Establishments which the
safety of the Empire and sound policy allow.’ A disorderly crowd
attended him back to St. James’s Palace after the opening of
Parliament, and the windows of his carriage were broken.
231. _‘O what delicate wooden spoons,’ etc._ _Don Quixote_, Part II.
Chap, lxvii.
_But Lord Castlereagh, etc._ Croker’s salary was raised from £3000
to £4000 in March 1816, the vote being passed by a majority of
only 29 (March 20).
_Flocci, etc._ See _ante_, note to p. 33.
232. _‘The high leaves,’ etc._ See Southey’s _The Holly Tree_, Stanza
5.
_Some evenings ago._ June 23, 1817, when Castlereagh proposed the
first reading of a Bill for further suspending the Habeas Corpus
Act.
232. _Castles and Oliver._ Violent debates took place in Parliament
during 1817 and 1818 in connection with the employment of Castle
and Oliver by the Government. See Hansard, _Parl. Debates_,
XXXVI. and XXXVIII., and Walpole’s _History of England_, I.
Chap. v. Castle was the chief witness against the Spa-Fields
rioters. Oliver supplied continuous reports of the progress of
insurrection in the two following years, 1817 and 1818.
233. _Lingo in the play._ O’Keefe’s _Agreeable Surprise_ (1798).
_Mr. Wynne._ See _ante_, note to p. 213.
_Lord Lascelles’s hat._ Henry Lascelles (1767–1841), a Yorkshire
member, succeeded to the Earldom of Harewood in 1820.
_That preux chevalier._ Dr. Stoddart left _The Times_ early in
1817 and entered into an arrangement with the proprietor of _The
Day_, in accordance with which that paper became known as _The
Day and New Times_. See Fox Bourne’s _English Newspapers_, I.
359–60.
_‘The age of chivalry,’ etc._ Burke’s _Reflections on the
Revolution in France_ (_Select Works_, ed. Payne, II. 89).
234. _There is no imputation, etc._ This was a remark of Mr. Lee Keck
in course of the debate.
_Fielding’s hero._ See _Jonathan Wild_, chap. xiii.
ON THE SPY-SYSTEM (_continued_). From _The Morning Chronicle_,
July 15, 1817.
_The debate._ On July 11, 1817.
_Genoa._ It was part of Brougham’s charge against the Government
that they had taken no effective steps on behalf of British
merchants of Genoa, who were treated by the Chamber of Commerce
at Genoa with every species of oppression and violence, and in
particular had been assessed for the professed purpose of buying
a frigate for the King of Sardinia.
235. ‘_Petty tyrant._’ Cf. ‘The little tyrant of his fields withstood.’
Gray’s _Elegy_, l. 58.
_Spanish America._ Brougham accused ministers of failing to
observe neutrality ‘in the great and interesting struggle of the
people of South America to rescue themselves from the most
odious tyranny that ever disgraced the history of the world.’
237. _Mr. Finnerty._ Peter Finnerty (1766?–1822) was imprisoned for two
years from Oct. 1797 for his account of the trial and execution
of William Orr. He afterwards became parliamentary reporter on
_The Morning Chronicle_. In Feb. 1811 he was imprisoned for
eighteen months for a libel charging Castlereagh with cruelty in
Ireland.
_Mr. Judkin Fitzgerald._ For a sketch of Thomas Judkin Fitzgerald,
High Sheriff of Tipperary, see Lecky’s _History of Ireland_
(Cabinet edition, IV. 277 _et seq._). A verdict against him of
£500 damages for illegal acts committed in order to suppress the
rebellion in Ireland led to the case being brought before
Parliament and to the passing of a wider Act of Indemnity.
_‘And struts,’ etc._ ‘Will sneaks a scriv’ner, an exceeding
knave.’ Pope, _Moral Essays_, I. 154.
_‘Innocent of the knowledge,’ etc._ _Macbeth_, Act III. Scene 2.
238. ON THE TREATMENT OF STATE PRISONERS. From _The Morning
Chronicle_, July 17, 1817.
_Mr. Hiley Addington._ See the debate in the House of Commons on
July 2, 1817. Hiley Addington was a brother of Lord Sidmouth, of
whom it was said,
‘When his periods hobble vilely
What “hear hims” burst from brother Hiley!’
238. _Thomas Evans_, imprisoned on suspicion under the Habeas Corpus
Suspension Act, was Librarian to the Society of Spencean
Philanthropists.
Note. _Mother Brownrigg._ Elizabeth Brownrigg, a midwife, who was
executed in 1767 for the murder of her apprentice, Mary
Clifford. See _ante_, note to p. 220.
Note. ‘_Comfit-makers wives’ oaths_’ _Henry IV._, Part I., Act
III. Scene 1.
239. _‘As a lamb’ etc._ _Isaiah_ liii. 7.
‘_Poor, poor dumb mouths._’ _Julius Caesar_, Act III. Scene 2.
_‘Camels in their war,’ etc._ _Coriolanus_, Act II. Scene 1.
_Sir Robert Filmer._ Sir Robert Filmer (d. 1653), the absolutist,
whose ‘Patriarcha, or the Natural Power of Kings asserted,’ was
published in 1680.
240. _‘Where is the madman,’ etc._ See _post_, p. 285, where much of
this matter is repeated.
_The Opposition and the Courier._ From _The Morning Chronicle_,
July 19, 1817.
_‘To acquaint us,’ etc._ _Macbeth_, Act III. Scene 1.
241. _As Mr. Canning formerly thought._ Canning resigned from the Duke
of Portland’s ministry in 1809, and did not join Lord
Liverpool’s ministry till 1816. The Foreign Office was offered
to him in 1812, but he refused to take it with the condition
that Castlereagh should lead the House of Commons.
ENGLAND IN 1798, _etc._ From _The Morning Chronicle_, Aug. 2,
1817.
243. ON THE EFFECTS OF WAR AND TAXES. From _The Morning
Chronicle_, Aug. 13, 1817.
_‘Great princes,’ etc._ Cowper’s _The Task_, Book V.
_Not even the Finance Committee._ The Government had recently
appointed a Select Committee to consider the receipts and
expenditure for 1817, 1818, and 1819, and to report from time to
time what reductions might be made in the expenditure.
244. Note. _‘And ever,’ etc._ _L’Allegro_, l. 136.
246. _The Pavilion at Brighton._ Begun by the Prince of Wales in 1784.
_‘Minions of the moon,’ etc._ _Henry IV._, Part I., Act I. Scene
2.
247. _‘If we made,’ etc._ _Henry IV._, Part II., Act II. Scene 4.
_‘The gout,’ etc._ _Measure for Measure_, Act III. Scene 1.
249. _A writer, whose own fault, etc._ Coleridge. See his Essay ‘On the
Vulgar Errors respecting Taxes and Taxation.’ _The Friend_
(Section I., Essay 7).
_Mr. Southey in his late pamphlet._ _The Letter to William Smith._
See _Essays, Moral and Political_, II. 28.
250. CHARACTER OF MR. BURKE. Copied in _The Champion_, Oct. 5,
1817, from an article by Hazlitt in the _Edinburgh Review_, Vol.
XXVIII. pp. 503–7, Aug. 1817, on ‘Coleridge’s _Literary Life_.’
252. _The word ‘abdication.’_ _Reflections on the Revolution in France_
(_Select Works_, ed. Payne, II. 31–2).
253. _‘Never so sure,’ etc._ Pope, _Moral Essays_, II. 51–2.
254. ON COURT INFLUENCE. From No. 1 (Jan. 3, 1818) of _The Yellow
Dwarf_, ‘a Weekly Miscellany’ founded by John Hunt, and
continued to No. 21 (May 23, 1818).
_‘To be honest,’ etc._ _Hamlet_, Act II. Scene 2.
_‘But still the world,’ etc._ Thomson, _The Seasons_ (Autumn, l.
233).
255. _Doctors Parr and Burney._ See Vol. I., note to p. 64.
256. ‘_A certificate of merit._’ ‘At every step of my progress in life,
(for in every step was I traversed and opposed), and at every
turnpike I met, I was obliged to show my passport.’ _A Letter to
a Noble Lord_ (_Works_, Bohn, V. 125).
256. _‘Thou hast it now,’ etc._ _Macbeth_, Act III. Scene 1.
‘_Swept and garnished._’ _St. Luke_ xi. 25.
257. _Indignatio facit versus._ Juvenal, _Satires_, i. 79.
_William Burke._ A kinsman, not the brother of Edmund. For his
letters to James Barry, the painter, see Barry’s _Works_ (1809).
_‘And with it,’ etc._ _Hamlet_, Act III. Scene 1.
258. _‘Escap’d,’ etc._ See _ante_, note to p. 225.
_‘Britain’s warriors,’ etc._ See _ante_, note to p. 162.
259. _Not ‘gain but glory.’_ ‘For gain, not glory winged his roving
flight.’ Pope, _Satires_, V. 71.
_‘In their Livery,’ etc._ _Antony and Cleopatra_, Act V. Scene 2.
_That sweet smile, etc._ _Henry VIII._, Act III. Scene 2.
ON COURT INFLUENCE (_concluded_). From No. 2 (Jan. 10, 1818) of
_The Yellow Dwarf_.
260. _‘Pierces through,’ etc._ _As You Like It_, Act II. Scene 1.
_‘Whosoever shall stumble,’ etc._ _St. Matthew_, xxi. 44.
_For ‘scorn to point,’ etc._ _Othello_, Act IV. Scene 2.
261. _‘A consummation,’ etc._ _Hamlet_, Act III. Scene 1.
_A certain distinguished character._ Castlereagh, who was regarded
as mainly responsible for the disastrous Walcheren expedition in
1809. For his vindication of the Government spies, see _ante_
pp. 232–8.
_Reynolds._ Thomas Reynolds (1771–1836) had long been notorious as
an informer in the Irish rebellion. His name appeared on the
grand jury which returned a true bill against Wilson and others
for high treason in connection with the Spa Field riots, and the
Government felt obliged to send him out of England on the
Consular service. See Lecky’s _History of Ireland_, Chap. X.
_The Attorney-General._ Sir Samuel Shepherd (1760–1840) succeeded
Garrow in 1817.
_Mr. Coleridge._ Coleridge’s _Biographia Literaria_ was published
in 1817. For the passage referred to on Anti-Jacobin slanders,
see note at the end of Chap. iii.
262. _His present friend and associate._ Gifford. See Hazlitt’s _Letter
to William Gifford_ (vol. I. p. 401).
_‘The cynosure,’ etc._ _L’Allegro_, l. 80.
263. _Have lately made an attempt, etc._ Hazlitt seems to refer to an
article of Southey’s republished (_Essays, Moral and Political_,
II. 35–107) under the title ‘On the Rise and Progress of Popular
Disaffection,’ and to Coleridge’s _Statesman’s Manual_.
_In discharge of an old debt._ See note to the Essay ‘On the
Tendency of Sects’ in _The Round Table_ (vol. I. p. 51) where,
after showing in the Essay that ‘there is a natural tendency in
sects to narrow the mind,’ he says, ‘we shall some time or other
give the reverse of the picture.’
264. _‘Or if severe,’ etc._
‘—— or, if severe in aught,
The love he bore to learning was in fault.’
Goldsmith, _The Deserted Village_, ll. 205–6.
_Dissenters are the safest partisans, etc._ This passage is
repeated from the last paragraph of the Essay ‘On the Tendency
of Sects.’
_The ‘hortus siccus’ of dissent._ Burke, _Reflections on the
Revolution in France_ (_Select Works_, ed. Payne, II. 14).
_Non ex quovis, etc._ Erasmus, _Adagiorum Chiliades_, ‘Munus
aptum.’
265. _But we have known some such, etc._ Hazlitt seems to have had his
father in his mind when he wrote this description. Cf. _The
Round Table_ (On Pedantry), vol. I. p. 82.
_The Book of Martyrs._ The name by which from the date (1563) of
its publication John Foxe’s (1516–1587) _Actes and Monuments_
was known. The martyrdoms of John Huss (1415) and Jerome of
Prague (1416) are narrated therein. John Ziska, leader of the
extreme Hussite party.
_Neale’s History of the Puritans._ Daniel Neal’s (1648–1743)
_History of the Puritans_ (1732–8).
_Calamy’s Account, etc._ Edmund Calamy’s (1671–1732) _Account of
the Ministers, Lecturers, Masters and Fellows of Colleges and
Schoolmasters who were Ejected or Silenced after the Restoration
in 1660_, originally part of his ‘Abridgment’ (1702) of Richard
Baxter’s posthumous ‘Narrative, etc. of his Life and Times,’ was
separately published in the second edition of the ‘Abridgment’
(1713). The number of ‘two thousand’ ejected (given by Hazlitt)
appeared on the title-page in Samuel Palmer’s edition of Calamy
(1802).
266. _Silver-tongued Bates._ William Bates (1625–1699) and John Howe
(1630–1705), two of the ejected divines.
_Lardner’s Credibility of the Gospel History._ By Nathaniel
Lardner (1684–1768), published 1727–1757.
_The Fratres Poloni._ See vol. II., note to p. 165. This work and
probably the others referred to in this Essay formed part of the
Library of Hazlitt’s father.
_‘Glory to God,’ etc._ _St. Luke_ ii. 14.
‘_Time-rent._’ Coleridge’s Sonnet to Schiller.
In _The Yellow Dwarf_ Hazlitt concluded as follows:—‘Happy are
they, who live in the dream of their own existence, and see all
things by the light of their own minds: who walk by faith and
hope, not by knowledge; to whom the guiding star of their youth
still shines from afar, and into whom the spirit of the world
has not entered! They have not been ‘hurt by the archers,’[73]
nor has the iron entered into their souls. They live in the
midst of arrows and of death, unconscious of harm. The evil
thing comes not nigh them. The shafts of ridicule pass unheeded
by, and malice loses its sting. The example of vice does not
rankle in their breasts, like the poisoned shirt of Nessus. Evil
impressions fall off from them, like drops of water. The yoke of
life is to them light and supportable. The world has no hold on
them. They are in it, not of it; and a dream and a glory is ever
about them.’ Cf. Hazlitt’s _Reply to Malthus_, vol. IV. p. 104.
ON THE CLERICAL CHARACTER. From No. 4 (Jan. 24, 1818) of _The
Yellow Dwarf_. This and the two following essays may be taken as
a further attempt to discharge the ‘old debt’ referred to on p.
263.
_‘Now mark,’ etc._ Cowper, _The Task_, I. 725.
_‘And in Franciscan,’ etc._ _Paradise Lost_, III. 480.
268. _‘To counterfeiten chere,’ etc._ Chaucer, _Canterbury Tales_, The
Prologue, ll. 139–141.
269. _‘The collusion,’ etc._ _Love’s Labour’s Lost_, Act IV. Scene 2.
270. _‘Eremites and friars,’ etc._ _Paradise Lost_, III. 474–5.
271. ON THE CLERICAL CHARACTER (_continued_). From No. 5 (Jan. 31,
1818) of _The Yellow Dwarf_.
272. _It is better to marry than burn._ ‘But if they cannot contain,
let them marry: for it is better to marry than to burn.’ _1
Corinthians_ vii. 9.
_‘Continents,’ says Hobbes, etc._ _Human Nature_, (_Works_, ed.
Molesworth, IV. 50).
273. _‘Where’s that palace,’ etc._ _Othello_, Act III. Scene 3.
‘_Pure in the last recesses of the mind._’ This line, which is
perhaps quoted by Hazlitt more frequently than any other, is
from Dryden’s translation from the Second Satire of Persius, l.
133.
_‘While they,’ etc._ _Othello_, Act III. Scene 3.
_The Society for the Suppression of Vice._ See _The Round Table_,
vol. p. 1. 60.
275. _‘To be conformed,’ etc._ _Romans_ xii. 2.
_‘Like little wanton boys,’ etc._ _Henry VIII._, Act III. Scene 2.
_‘Glimpses,’ etc._ Wordsworth’s Sonnet, ‘The world is too much
with us.’
276. _‘Who far,’ etc._ Dryden’s _The Hind and the Panther_, i. 312–3.
_Bishop Watson’s Life._ Richard Watson (1737–1816), Professor of
Chemistry at Cambridge, and afterwards Bishop of Llandaff. His
life, written by himself, was published by his son in 1817.
Mosheim’s _Institutiones Historiæ Ecclesiasticæ_ was published in
1726 (Eng. trans. 1765–8), Anthony Wood’s _Athenæ Oxonienses_ in
1691–2.
277. ON THE CLERICAL CHARACTER (_concluded_). From No. 6 (Feb. 7,
1818) of _The Yellow Dwarf_.
_‘One fate,’ etc._ For this and the two following quotations from
Southey, see his _Lay of the Laureate_, and _ante_, pp. 109 _et
seq._
278. _Launce._ _Two Gentlemen of Verona_, Act IV. Scene 4.
279. _Sir John Oldcastle._ ‘The good Lord Cobham,’ the original of
Shakespeare’s Falstaff. He was hanged as a heretic in 1417.
‘_Blind with double darkness._’ Hazlitt elsewhere quotes, ‘with
double darkness bound,’ and possibly recalls a line (593) in
_Samson Agonistes_, ‘But yield to double darkness nigh at hand.’
280. _Brandreth._ Jeremiah Brandreth executed on Nov. 7, 1817 for an
attempt at insurrection into which he had been trapped by Oliver
the spy.
_‘They will have them to shew,’ etc._ Burke, _Reflections on the
Revolution in France_ (_Select Works_, ed. Payne, II. 121).
_An eminent poet._ Probably Southey, who in his letter to _William
Smith, Esq., M.P._ said that the Government ‘must curb the
seditious press, and keep it curbed. For this purpose, if the
laws are not at present effectual, they should be made so.’
281. _Deprecated by Mr. Burke._ _Reflections on the Revolution in
France_ (_Select Works_, ed. Payne, II. 104–105), and _Thoughts
on French Affairs_ (_Works_, Bohn, III. 353).
_‘At this day,’ etc._ Wordsworth, _The Excursion_, Book IV.
282. _By ‘the sufferance of supernal power.’_ _Paradise Lost_, I. 241.
WHAT IS THE PEOPLE? From No. 10 (March 7, 1818) of _The Yellow
Dwarf_.
‘_A vile jelly._’ _King Lear_, Act III. Scene 7.
284. ‘_The unbought grace of life._’ Burke’s _Reflections on the
Revolution in France_ (_Select Works_, ed. Payne, II. 89).
Note. Cf. _ante_, pp. 174–175.
285. _Latter Lammas._ _I.e._, never.
_‘Miraturque,’ etc._ Virgil, _Georgics_, II. 82.
_Mr. Coke_ was Thomas William Coke (1752–1842), member for Norfolk
(except for one short interval) from 1776 to 1832, and
well-known for his zeal in the reform of agriculture. He was
created Earl of Leicester of Holkham in 1837.
Note. Lord Balmerino was executed in 1746, and the famous Simon
Fraser, Lord Lovat, in 1747, for participation in the Jacobite
Rebellion of 1745.
287. _‘Gods to punish,’ etc._ _Coriolanus_, Act III. Scene 1.
_‘Why, what a fool,’ etc._ _The Tempest_, Act II. Scene 2.
288. _‘Because men,’ etc._ Cowper, _The Task_, V. 192.
_‘Cribbed,’ etc._ _Macbeth_, Act III. Scene 4.
_‘The right divine,’ etc._ Pope’s _Dunciad_, IV. 188.
_‘Broad and casing,’ etc._ _Macbeth_, Act III. Scene 4.
289. _‘Like the rainbow’s,’ etc._ Burns, _Tam O’ Shanter_. Hazlitt
changes the order of the lines.
_‘Enthroned in the hearts of Kings._’ _Merchant of Venice_, Act
IV. Scene 1.
_‘And levy,’ etc._ _Paradise Lost_, II. 501–502.
_‘Steeped in poverty,’ etc._ _Othello_, Act IV. Scene 2.
290. Note. Captain James Burney’s (1750–1821) _Buccaneers of
America_, a part of his _Chronological History of the
Discoveries in the South Sea or Pacific Ocean_, was published in
1816.
291. _Mr. C—— or Lord C——._ Canning and Castlereagh.
_‘Any faction,’ etc._ Cf. _An Appeal from the New to the Old
Whigs_ (_Works_, Bohn, III. 45).
292. WHAT IS THE PEOPLE? (_concluded_). From No. II (March 14,
1818) of _The Yellow Dwarf_.
293. _‘If they had not ploughed,’ etc._ _Judges_, xiv. 18.
295. _When Mr. John Gifford, etc._ John Gifford or John Richards Green
(1758–1818) was editor of _The Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine_
which succeeded the famous _Anti-Jacobin or Weekly Examiner_ in
1798. The denunciation of Coleridge and his friends referred to
in the text was made in a note to the poem of _The New Morality_
in _The Beauties of the Anti-Jacobin_ (1799). See Vol. I. note
to p. 401, and the _Athenaeum_, May 31, 1900.
_‘Make him a willow-cabin,’ etc._ _Twelfth Night_, Act I. Scene 5.
_He indeed assures us, etc._ Southey’s _Essays, Moral and
Political_, I. 420–421.
296. _Mr. Locke has observed._ _An Essay concerning Human
Understanding_, Book IV. Chap. xx.
297. _Like Orlando’s brother._ _As You Like It_, Act I. Scene 1.
‘_Stying us._’ ‘_And here you sty me in this hard rock._’ _The
Tempest_, Act I. Scene 2.
_Joanna Southcott._ Joanna Southcott (1750–1814) had recently
caused an extraordinary amount of excitement in the country by
her promise to bring forth into the world the second Christ.
‘_When the sky falls._’ ‘Si les nues tomboyent, esperoyt prendre
les alouettes.’ _Rabelais_, Book I. Chap. xi.
298. _‘Hold a barren sceptre,’ etc._ _Macbeth_, Act III. Scene 1.
_‘For the Son to tread,’ etc._
‘Look to thy sire, and in his steady way,
As in his Father’s he, learn thou to tread.’
Southey’s _Carmen Nuptiale_, The Dream, Stanza 32.
_The two Ferdinands._ Ferdinand I. of Naples and Ferdinand VII. of
Spain.
299. _Poor Evans._ See _ante_, p. 238.
300. _Mr. Cobbett himself, etc._ See _ante_, p. 224.
301. _His Lisbon Job._ Canning had gone to Lisbon in 1814, and had been
appointed ambassador extraordinary, at a salary of £14,000, to
receive the King of Portugal on his return from Brazil. The king
did not return after all, and Canning’s appointment was
represented by the Opposition as a job. A vote of censure was
moved in the House of Commons on May 6, 1817, and defeated by a
majority of 174.
301. _‘Duller,’ etc._ _Hamlet_, Act I. Scene 5.
_‘The dim suffusion,’ etc._
‘But thou
Revisit’st not these eyes, that roll in vain
To find thy piercing ray, and find no dawn;
So thick a drop serene hath quenched their orbs,
Or dim suffusion veiled.’
_Paradise Lost_, III. 22–26.
_‘Making Ossa,’ etc._ _Hamlet_, Act V. Scene 1.
302. _‘As gross,’ etc._ _Othello_, Act III. Scene 3.
303. _‘A necessity,’ etc._ Burke, _Reflections on the Revolution in
France_. (_Select Works_, ed. Payne, II. 114).
‘_Too foolish fond and pitiful._’ Hazlitt seems to refer to Lear’s
words to Cordelia (Act _IV._ Scene 7), ‘I am a very foolish fond
old man.’
_‘Did never wrong,’ etc._ Hazlitt seems to have in mind the words,
‘Know, Caesar doth not wrong, nor without cause will he be
satisfied.’ _Julius Caesar_, Act III. Scene 1.
304. _Exit by Mistake._ Produced at the Haymarket in July, 1816.
See Hazlitt’s Dramatic Essays.
305. ON THE ROYAL CHARACTER. From No. 20 (May 16, 1818) of _The
Yellow Dwarf_.
306. _‘There’s a divinity,’ etc._ _Hamlet_, Act IV. Scene 5.
307. _Coates._ Francis Cotes (1725–1770).
310. _One Englishman._ He means Burke.
_Master of Hoyle._ Edmond Hoyle’s (1672–1769) _Short Treatise on
the Game of Whist_ was published in 1742.
_The Jockey club._ Founded in the middle of the eighteenth
century.
311. _Cibber tells us._ Apology for the _Life of Mr. Colley Cibber_,
Chap. ii.
_Jefferies._ Jeffreys was appointed Lord Chief Justice in 1683,
and is perhaps chiefly remembered for his famous circuit in the
west of England in 1685 after the accession of James II., who
made him Lord Chancellor.
THE FUDGE FAMILY IN PARIS. From No. 17 (April 25, 1818) of _The
Yellow Dwarf_.
‘_Set it down, my tables._’ _Hamlet_, Act I. Scene 5.
‘_A full solempne man._’ Chaucer, _The Canterbury Tales_,
Prologue, l. 209.
312. _A merry Andrew._ Gifford perhaps.
_The more pitiful Jack-Pudding._ It is plain from a note in _The
Yellow Dwarf_ that Hazlitt refers to Canning.
‘_Immortal verse._’ _L’Allegro_, 137.
_‘Tam knew,’ etc._ Burns’s _Tam O’ Shanter_.
_A late celebrated wit and orator._ Probably Curran, who died in
October 1817.
‘_A certain little gentleman._’ Moore’s description of himself in
the Preface to _The Fudge Family in Paris_.
Note. _‘I look down,’ etc._ _Othello_, Act V. Scene 2.
313. _In the ‘Vicar of Wakefield.’_ Chapter xi.
‘_The damnable face-making._’ _Hamlet_, Act III. Scene 2.
_‘The flocci-nauci,’ etc._ See _ante_, note to p. 33.
_Dr. S——._ Dr. Stoddart. See _ante_, note to p. 153.
_And ‘find no dawn,’ etc._ _Paradise Lost_, III. 24.
‘_Blind mouth._’ _Lycidas_, 119.
‘_His sweet voice._’ _Coriolanus_, Act _II._ Scene 3.
314. _Billingsgate slang._ Billingsgate was notorious for its coarse
language as early as Fuller. See Wheatley and Cunningham,
_London Past and Present_, I. 183.
314. _‘With shame,’ etc._ _Richard II._, Act II. Scene 1.
_‘Like a rebel’s whore.’_ _Macbeth_, Act I. Scene 2.
_Brangle, etc._ Cf.
‘And Noise and Norton, Brangling and Breval,
Dennis and Dissonance, and captious Art.’
Pope, _The Dunciad_, II. 238–9.
_‘The pillar’d firmament,’ etc._ _Comus_, ll. 598–9.
315. _‘The sad historian,’ etc._ ‘The sad historian of the pensive
plain.’ Goldsmith, _The Deserted Village_, l. 136.
_‘As precious,’ etc._ _Julius Caesar_, Act II. Scene 1.
_‘Return,’ etc._ Letter IV.
_E******._ E—gl—d in the original.
317. _Indignatio facit versus._ See _ante_, note to p. 257.
318. _‘Yes—’twas a cause,’ etc._ Letter XI.
319. _‘By the bye though,’ etc._ Letter I.
_‘Good Viscount S—dm—th,’ etc._ Letter IX.
321. _‘They do not cut up,’ etc._ Burke, _Letter to a Noble Lord_
(_Works_, Bohn, V. 145).
CHARACTER OF LORD CHATHAM. First published as one of the critical
notices in _The Eloquence of the British Senate_.
‘_A flame of sacred vehemence._’ _Comus_, l. 795.
323. _‘Flew an eagle flight,’ etc._ _Timon of Athens_, Act I. Scene 1.
_‘Sailing with,’ etc._ Gray, _The Progress of Poesy_, ll. 116–7.
‘_Both end and use._’ Cf. ‘His actions’, passions’, being’s use
and end.’ Pope, _Essay on Man_, I. 66.
_‘Laps it,’ etc._ _Comus_, l. 257.
325. CHARACTER OF MR. BURKE. First published in _The Eloquence of
the British Senate_.
_The following speech._ On presenting to the House of Commons (on
the 11th February 1780) a plan for the better security of the
independence of Parliament, and the economical reformation of
the civil and other establishments (_Works_, Bohn, II. 55).
326. _‘The elephant,’ etc._ _Paradise Lost_, IV. 345–7.
_‘Native and endued,’ etc._ _Hamlet_, Act IV. Scene 7.
328. Note. In _The Eloquence of the British Senate_ this note
proceeded: ‘and he produced less effect on the mob that compose
the English Public than Paine or Joel Barlow, at least at the
time.’ Joel Barlow (1755–1812), the American poet, was, like
Paine, an active sympathiser with the French Revolution.
329. ‘_Alas! Leviathan was not so tamed._’ Cowper, _The Task_, II. 322.
_The corner stone, etc._ _Psalms_, cxviii. 22.
_To the Jews, etc._ _1 Corinthians_ i. 23.
333. _‘How charming,’ etc._ _Comus_, l. 476.
336. _Dr. Johnson observed._ See his _Life of Pope_ (_Works_, Oxford,
1825), VIII. 329.
Note. ‘_Proud keep of Windsor._’ _A letter to a Noble Lord_
(_Works_, Bohn, V. 137).
337. _A person._ Hazlitt’s early friend, Joseph Fawcett, perhaps. See
_Table Talk_, On Criticism.
CHARACTER OF MR. FOX. From _The Eloquence of the British Senate_,
where the ‘Character’ begins: ‘I have hitherto deferred giving
any opinion on the talents of eminent speakers, till I could
present the reader with something that might justify the
encomiums passed upon them; as the following is one of the most
memorable of Mr. Fox’s speeches, I shall prefix to it a sort of
character, the best I can give, of this celebrated man.’ The
speech referred to was on the War with France, delivered in
1794.
Note. ‘_Craftily qualified._’ _Othello_, Act II. Scene 3.
339. _‘Whose sound,’ etc._ _King Lear_, Act I. Scene 1.
_That is an automaton._ In _The Eloquence of the British Senate_
Hazlitt has the following note to this passage: ‘I ought to beg
pardon of the polite reader for thus rudely contrasting these
two celebrated men and leaders of parties together. It has of
late become more fashionable to consider them in the light of
the United Friends. But as I am no sign-painter, I hope I may be
excused for not adhering exactly to the _costume_ of the times.
This agreeable idea might however, if skilfully executed, be
improved into a very appropriate sign for the tap-room of the
house of commons. My Lord Howick the other day drew a pleasing
picture of them _shaking hands in Elysium_. It must be owned
that this is pretty and poetical. Happy, well assorted pair!
Methinks I see you, bowing to one another, with repeated
assurances of friendship and esteem, but half believed, just
like—lord Grenville and lord Howick in the park! This was
probably what his lordship had in his mind at the time: but as
our _young_ orators generally love to shew that they have _read_
the classics, so perhaps his lordship was willing to shew that
he had not _forgot_ them. It is pleasing to see great men
sweetening the cares of state with the flowers of poetical
allusion; condescending to turn with a benign countenance from
the serious realities of life, to the lighter scenes of fable
and romance; still wandering, (as in their boyish days) with
Dido and Æneas, and taking an imaginary trip from Downing Street
to the Elysian Fields, and from the Elysian Fields back again!
After all, I do not know that it would be any disgrace to Mr.
Fox to associate with Mr. Pitt in the other world, if we
recollect the company he kept in this. Lord H—— I believe, on
the same occasion, quoted Dryden, and compared the late duke of
Brunswick to Darius. Really, his lordship’s researches in poetry
are astonishing; they are almost as extensive and profound as
his knowledge of the affairs of Europe, or of the fate of
battles! There is some excuse, however, for this last mentioned
quotation, as though the passage quoted was by no means new in
itself, yet the particular application of it must certainly have
been very new to his lordship’s mind, and one which the public
might not have been disposed to give him credit for without some
positive evidence. To complete the solemnity of the scene,
nothing more was wanting but for the whole house to have joined
chorus in this affecting and well known specimen of elegiac
sadness, particularly as it had been already set to music, one
would suppose for this very purpose.’
Note 1. Hazlitt refers to an article on Fox by William Godwin
published in _The Morning Chronicle_, Nov. 22, 1806.
Note 2. John Upton published an edition of _The Faerie Queen_ in
1758.
340. _Lord Lansdown._ Lord Shelburne, created Marquis of Lansdowne in
1784.
342. _‘Jutting frieze,’ etc._ _Macbeth_, Act I. Scene 6.
344. _‘With mighty wings,’ etc._ _Paradise Lost_, I. 20–2.
345. ‘_The dazzling fence of argument._’ Cf.
‘Enjoy your dear wit, and gay rhetoric,
That hath so well been taught her dazzling fence.’
_Comus_, ll. 790–1.
345. ‘_An honest man’s the noblest work of God._’ Pope’s _Essay on
Man_, IV. 248.
346. _What Burke said of him._ In a speech on the Army Estimates (Feb.
9, 1790), in which he replied to Fox’s eulogy of the French
Revolution. See _Works_, Bohn, III. 273–4.
CHARACTER OF MR. PITT, 1806. See _ante_, pp. 14 _et seq._ and
notes.
349. Note. The passage referred to is from Pitt’s Speech on the
Regency, delivered on January 16, 1789.
350. PITT AND BUONAPARTE. This essay by Coleridge is reprinted in
_Essays on His Own Times_, vol. II. pp. 319–329. The editor
(Coleridge’s daughter Sara, the wife of Henry Nelson Coleridge),
referring to the essay, says (I. lxxxv. note), ‘“The character
of Pitt” is given to my Father on the repeated testimony of Mr.
Stuart, which indeed was scarcely needed to confirm the strong
internal evidence of both style and matter.’ See J. D.
Campbell’s _Samuel Taylor Coleridge_, p. 108.
356. AN EXAMINATION OF MR. MALTHUS’S DOCTRINES. From No. 14 (April
4, 1818) of _The Yellow Dwarf_. In these concluding papers
Hazlitt repeats the substance of the more elaborate criticism
which he had already published in 1807, under the title of _A
Reply to Malthus_. See that work and Hazlitt’s sketch of Malthus
in _The Spirit of the Age_ (vol. IV. of the present edition).
359. _Major Torrens._ Robert Torrens (1780–1864), who, after serving in
the Royal Marines, retired on half-pay, and devoted himself to
economical study.
361. _This will never do._ Perhaps this is a reference to the famous
opening words of the _Edinburgh Review_ article on Wordsworth’s
_Excursion_ (xxiv. p. 1). The _Edinburgh_ had defended Malthus.
ON THE ORIGINALITY OF MR. MALTHUS’S ESSAY. This essay does not
seem to have been published in _The Yellow Dwarf_.
367. ON THE PRINCIPLE OF POPULATION, ETC. From Hazlitt’s _Reply to
Malthus_, Letter III. See vol. IV. of the present edition.
371. _‘What conjuration,’ etc._ _Othello_, Act I. Scene 3.
373. _‘These three bear record,’ etc._ Cf. _1 John_ v. 7.
_‘’Tis as easy as lying,’ etc._ _Hamlet_, Act III. Scene 2.
374. _‘To this end,’ etc._ Malthus’s _Essay, etc._ (2nd Ed. 1803), pp.
538–540.
375. _Well answered by Mr. Cobbett._ Cobbett addressed a letter ‘To
Parson Malthus’ (_Political Register_, May 1819) beginning
abruptly ‘Parson.’ ‘No assemblage of words,’ he says, ‘can give
an appropriate designation of you; and therefore, as being the
single word which best suits the character of such a man, I call
you _Parson_,’ _etc._
376. _In a separate work._ See his _Reply to Malthus_ in vol. IV. of
the present edition.
381. QUERIES RELATING TO THE ESSAY ON POPULATION. No. 23 of _The
Round Table_ series in _The Examiner_ (Oct. 29, 1815), which is
in the form of a letter addressed to the President of the Round
Table, and begins as follows:—‘Sir,—You some time ago inserted
in your Paper [Round Table, No. 26, Feb. 15, 1815] a letter from
_A Mechanic_, who seemed strangely puzzled by a learned friend
of his, who thwarts him in all his notions, political, moral,
domestic and economical, by interrogatories put to him out of
Mr. Malthus’s _Essay on Population_. I do not know whether your
Correspondent has got rid of his troublesome acquaintance; but
if he has not, I think he will be able to do it by putting to
him the following questions as to the merits of Mr. Malthus and
his work, which I met with in the course of my reading this
morning, and which it appears to me to be incumbent on the
admirers of that gentleman to answer, Aye or No.’
383. _‘Sicklied over,’ etc._ _Hamlet_, Act II. Scene 1.
385. _‘Neither married,’ etc._ _St. Matthew_ xxii. 30.
_‘Beware therefore,’ etc._ Chaucer, _The Canterbury Tales_, The
Somnour’s Tale, ll. 2074 _et seq._
ADVERTISEMENT, ETC., FROM ‘THE ELOQUENCE OF THE BRITISH SENATE’
All the biographical and critical notes, introductory to the selected
Speeches, are here reproduced, except (1) a few which consist merely of
dates, and (2) the ‘characters’ of Chatham, Burke, Fox and Pitt. These
were republished by Hazlitt in _Political Essays_, and will be found in
the present reprint of that work (see _ante_, pp. 321–350). Where there
are two notes on the same speaker, they have been printed together under
the same heading. In cases where Hazlitt specially mentions a particular
speech, a reference to that speech is given below. Hazlitt himself, in
the Table of Contents, described the following as the ‘principal
biographical notices,’ viz., in vol. I., Cromwell, Whitlocke, Lord
Belhaven, Mr. Pulteney, Lord Chesterfield, Sir John St. Aubin, and Sir
Robert Walpole; and, in vol. II., Lord Chatham, Lord Mansfield, Lord
Camden, Mr. Burke, Mr. Fox, and Mr. Pitt.
389. _‘Who strut and fret,’ etc._ _Macbeth_, Act V. Scene 5.
390. _‘Wherein I saw them,’ etc._ _Hamlet_, Act I. Scene 4.
‘_Set the imprisoned wranglers free again._’ Cowper, _The Task_,
Book IV. 34.
391. _‘The things themselves,’ etc._,
‘The things we know are neither rich nor rare.’
Pope, _Prologue to the Satires_, 171.
393. _Sir Edward Coke._ The speech selected by Hazlitt was delivered on
a Motion for Supply, Aug. 5, 1625 (_Parl. Hist._ II. 11.). On a
phrase of Coke’s ‘to petition the King rather for a _logique_
than a _rhetorique_ hand,’ Hazlitt has the following note: ‘This
mode of expression seems natural enough to any one who was
familiar with Cicero’s description of the difference between
logic and rhetoric, and who knew that most of his hearers either
were, or would be thought, equally learned. It was a convenient
short-hand language to those who were hardly ever accustomed to
think or speak but in classical allusions, and which no one
could affect to misunderstand without first exposing his own
ignorance:—it was a sort of _word to the wise_. So that its
being abrupt and far-fetched would be a recommendation of it,
and would even give it an air of simplicity with men of deep
learning, as being more in the way of their habitual and
favourite train of ideas. But this stile, which may be called
the abstruse or pedantic, is soon exploded when knowledge
becomes more generally diffused, and the pretension to it
universal: when there are few persons who profess to be very
learned, and none are contented to be thought entirely ignorant;
when every one who can read is a critic; when the reputation of
taste and good sense is not confined to an acquaintance with the
Greek and Latin authors, and it is not thought necessary to a
man’s understanding an eloquent discourse, or even to his making
one, that he should ever have read a definition either of logic
or rhetoric.’
393. _Mr. Burke’s famous Bill._ For the better security of the
independence of Parliament and the economical reformation of the
civil and other establishments. Hazlitt included in his
selections Burke’s great speech (Feb. 11, 1780) introducing the
Bill.
393. _Sir Robert Cotton._ The speech was delivered on Aug. 6, 1825
(_Parl. Hist._, II. 14).
394. _Dr. John Williams._ Speech on opening Parliament, Feb. 26, 1626
(_Parl. Hist._, II. 39).
_Sir Heneage Finch._ Speech on Feb. 6, 1626 (_Parl. Hist._, II.
41).
_Sir Dudley Carleton._ Speech on May 12, 1626 (_Parl. Hist._, II.
120).
395. _Mr. Creskeld._ Speech on the Detention of some Members of the
House, March 25, 1627 (_Parl. Hist._, II. 240).
_Sir Francis Rouse._ Speech on June 3, 1628 (_Parl. Hist._, II.
377).
_Sir John Elliott._ Speech on Public Affairs, June 3, 1628 (_Parl.
Hist._, II. 380).
_A certain political writer._ Cobbett presumably.
_Sir Benjamin Rudyard._ Speech on the State of Religion, June 3,
1628 (_Parl. Hist._, II. 385).
_Edmund Waller._ The speech referred to in the first paragraph was
a speech on the Supply, April 22, 1640 (_Parl. Hist._, II. 555);
that referred to in the second paragraph a speech praying for a
mitigation of the sentence passed upon him by Parliament, July
4, 1643 (_Parl. Hist._, III. 140).
397. _Dr. Joseph Hall._ The speech which shews that ‘passion makes men
eloquent’ was a speech in defence of the Church and Clergy, 1641
(_Parl. Hist._, II. 987).
_Bulstrode Whitlocke._ The speech referred to in the second
paragraph was a speech on changing the old Law style, Feb. 1641
(_Parl. Hist._, II. 1078).
398. _William Lenthall._ Speech on Nov. 13, 1646 (_Parl. Hist._, III.
530).
_Oliver Cromwell._ Hazlitt gave the brief speech in the House of
Commons on Dec. 9, 1644, another small fragment, and Cromwell’s
speech dissolving the second Protectorate Parliament (Feb. 4,
1658).
_John Thurloe._ Speech in vindication of the Bill to tax Royalists
(1656).
399. _Richard Cromwell._ Speech on the Meeting of Parliament (1658).
_Charles II._ Speech on the second Meeting of Parliament, May 8,
1661 (_Parl. Hist._, IV. 178).
_Lord Bristol._ Speech on the Test Act, March 15, 1672 (_Parl.
Hist._, IV. 564).
400. _Earl of Caernarvon._ Speech on the impeachment of Lord Danby,
Dec. 23, 1678 (_Parl. Hist._, IV. 1074).
_Henry Booth._ Speech on putting certain Justices out of
commission (1681).
401. _John, Lord Somers._ Hazlitt gives the speeches of Somers, Lord
Nottingham, Sir George Treby and Sir Robert Howard on the
Abdication of James II. (1688).
‘_In contempt of the people_.’ See _ante_, note to p. 175.
402. _Sir John Knight._ Speech against the proposal for naturalising
foreign protestants, March 1694 (_Parl. Hist._, V. 851). Knight
concluded his speech with the motion ‘that the serjeant be
commanded to open the doors, and let us first kick this Bill out
of the house, and then foreigners out of the kingdom.’ Knight
was member for Bristol 1692–1695, plotted for the restoration of
James and died in obscurity in 1718.
403. ‘_Metaphysical aid._’ _Macbeth_, Act I. Scene 5.
_‘Non bene,’ etc._ Ovid, _Metamorphoses_, II. 846.
‘_Reason panders will._’ _Hamlet_, Act III. Scene 4.
_‘The downright violence,’ etc._ ‘My downright violence and storm
of fortunes.’ _Othello_, Act I. Scene 3.
_Lord Belhaven._ Speech in the Scottish Convention, against the
Union, printed in Appendix to Vol. VI. of _Parl. Hist._, p.
cxlii.
404. _‘The melancholy madness,’ etc._ Junius, Letter VII.
405. _George I._ Speech on his accession.
_Sir Thomas Hanmer._ The first speech referred to was the
Speaker’s address to the Throne (1715), the second a speech on
the Reduction of the Army (1717).
_‘Threads’ etc._ Cowper, _The Task_, III. 147.
_Sir Richard Steele._ Speech on annual parliaments (1716).
406. _The following speech._ Speech on the Triennial Bill, March 13,
1734 (_Parl. Hist._, IX. 471). Walpole having referred to some
inconveniences of the democratical form of government, Hazlitt
makes the following remarks in a note:—
‘Sir Robert here, by entirely leaving out the consideration of the
other parts of our constitution which are intended to operate as
checks and correctives of the democratic part, very ingeniously
models the house of commons according to his own wishes, and at
the same time in such a manner as to answer the purposes of all
the other parts, and in fact to render them unnecessary. It has
always been pretended that the house of commons was but one
branch of the legislative—the representative of the people; and
that an antidote to any evils that might arise from this part of
the system was wisely provided in the other branches, which were
to represent property and power; but care has been taken to make
sure of the remedy in the first instance, namely by inoculating
the patient before the disease was caught, and making the house
of commons itself never anything more than the representative of
property and power.’
_‘The popular harangue,’ etc._ Cowper, _The Task_, IV. 31–32.
408. _A niche in one of his satires._ _Moral Essays_, I. 174–209.
409. _Earl of Strafford._ Speech on the Mutiny Bill, Feb. 22, 1732
(_Parl. Hist._, VIII. 1008). Thomas Wentworth, third Earl of
Strafford, ambassador extraordinary at the Hague during the
critical years 1711–1714 (see Swift’s _History of the last four
years of Queen Anne_) was a great-nephew of ‘the great lord
Strafford.’
_‘The worse appear,’ etc._ _Paradise Lost_, II. 113–114.
410. To Heathcote’s speech, which was on the Establishment of
Excise Officers, Hazlitt has the following note: ‘The
introduction of the excise laws excited an immense ferment
through the kingdom about this time. It was called by Pulteney,
‘that monster, the Excise.’ And Walpole had more difficulty in
weathering the storm of opposition that rose on this occasion,
than on any other. How tame are we grown! How familiar with that
slavery and ruin, threatened us by so many succeeding prophets
and politicians! We play with the bugbears, and handle them, and
do not find that they hurt us. We look back and smile at the
disproportionate resistance of our inexperienced forefathers to
petty vexations and imaginary grievances, and are like the old
horse in the fable, who wondered at the folly of the young
horse, who refused even to be saddled, while he crouched
patiently under the heaviest burthens.’
411. _Mr. Campbell._ Speech against a bill to prevent officers of
Government from sitting in Parliament, commonly called the Place
Bill, Feb. 26, 1734 (_Parl. Hist._, IX. 367).
_‘’Twas mine,’ etc._ _Othello_, Act III. Scene 3.
_Samuel Sandys._ Speech in reply to Campbell. Sandys’s
‘principles’ consisted of hostility to Walpole, after whose fall
he became Chancellor of the Exchequer and Lord Sandys. In 1742
he opposed the introduction of his own Place Bill.
412. _See his speech on the theatres._ Hazlitt included Chesterfield’s
speech on the Play-house Bill (1737—_Parl. Hist._, X. 319) among
his selections.
413. _Sir John St. Aubin._ Speech on the Triennial Bill, March 13, 1734
(_Parl. Hist._, IX. 400).
_Sir Watkin William Wynne._ Speech on the same.
414. _The following Speech on abolishing, etc._ April, 1747.
415. _Honourable Edward Coke._ Speech on the Address, Dec. 1, 1743
(_Parl. Hist._, XIII. 135).
_Sir Dudley Rider._ Speech on the Attainder Bill, May 3, 1744
(_Parl. Hist._, XIII. 859).
416. _Mr. Grenville._ Speech on the Stamp Act, January 1766 (_Parl.
Hist._, XVI. 101).
418. _‘As dry,’ etc._ _As You Like It_, Act II. Scene 7.
419. _Junius says._ Letter LIX. Isaac Barré (1726–1802), son of a
French refugee, served under Wolfe at Quebec and sat in
Parliament under Lord Shelburne’s patronage from 1761 to 1790.
He is one of the many to whom the authorship of Junius has been
attributed. He was author of the phrase ‘sons of liberty’
applied to the American colonists.
_Garrit aniles._ Horace, _Satires_, II. 6. 77–8.
_Courteney._ Hazlitt seems to refer to Boswell’s friend, John
Courtenay (1741–1816), member for Tamworth (1780–1796), who is
described by Wraxall (_Posthumous Memoirs_, V. 4) as ‘eccentric,
fearless, sarcastic, highly informed, always present to himself,
dealing his blows on every side regardless on whom they fell.’
420. _The Barrés, etc._ In the _Dictionary of National Biography_, the
latest of the ‘motley lists of fame,’ Hazlitt would have found
not only the Dyches, the Fennings, the Lillys, and the Laxtons,
but also ‘characters on whom a dazzling splendour has been
shed.’
_The following masterly character._ Burke, _Letter to a Noble
Lord_ (_Works_, Bohn, V. 117).
_The following speech._ On the Bill for doubling the Militia, June
22, 1779 (_Parl. Hist._, XX. 947).
Hazlitt has the two following notes on Burke’s speech on American
Taxation (April 19, 1774—_Works_, Bohn, I. 383 _et seq._):—
‘The following arguments towards the conclusion of this speech are
so sensible, so moderate, so wise and beautiful, that I cannot
resist the temptation of copying them out, though I did not at
first intend it. Burke’s speeches are to me, in this my
parliamentary progress, what the Duke’s castle was to Sancho: I
could be content to stay there longer than I am able. I have no
inclination to leave the stately palaces, the verdant lawns, the
sumptuous entertainments, the grave discourse, and pleasing
sounds of music, to sally forth in search of bad roads, meagre
fare, and barren adventures. Charles Fox is indeed to come; but
he is but the Knight of the Green Surtout. Pitt is the brazen
head, that delivers mysterious answers; and Sheridan, Master
Peter with his puppet-show. _Mais allons._’
‘Thus was this great man, merely for disclaiming metaphysical
distinctions and shewing their inapplicability to practical
questions, considered as an unintelligible reasoner; as if you
were chargeable with the very folly of which you convict others.
Burke understood metaphysics, and knew their true boundaries:
when he saw others venturing blindly upon this treacherous
ground, and called out to them to stop, shewing them where they
were, they said, this man is a metaphysician. General
unqualified assertions, universal axioms, and abstract rules
serve to embody our prejudices; they are the watch-words of
party, the strong-holds of the passions. It is therefore
dangerous to meddle with them. Solid reason means nothing more
than being carried away by our passions, and solid sense is that
which requires no reflection to understand it.’
421. _The following boyish rhapsody._ For an account of this matter see
Trevelyan’s _Early History of Charles James Fox_, pp. 414 _et
seq._
_In the Louvre._ In 1802. See _Memoirs of William Hazlitt_, I. 91.
422. _Sir W. Meredith._ Speech on the Lord Mayor and Oliver being
committed to the Tower.
_Junius praises._ Letter LIX.
_Servetur ad imum, etc._ Horace, _Ars Poetica_, 126–7.
_Hon. Temple Luttrell._ Speech on Mr. Buller’s Motion that 2000
additional seamen be employed for the year 1775, to enforce the
measures of Government in America, Feb. 13, 1775 (_Parl. Hist._,
XVIII. 308).
_Mr. Wilkes._ Speech on the Motion for expunging the Resolution
respecting his Expulsion, Feb. 22, 1775 (_Parl. Hist._, XVIII.
358).
423. _Mr. Dunning._ Speech on the Bill for punishing Persons suspected
of being Pirates, Feb. 7, 1777 (_Parl. Hist._, XIX. 24).
‘_Good set terms._’ _As You Like It_, Act II. Scene 7.
_William Pitt._ It is strange that Hazlitt mentions only Pitt’s
office of Chancellor of the Exchequer, and not the fact that he
was Prime Minister from 1783 to 1801, and from 1804 till his
death in 1806.
424. _‘The wine of life,’ etc._ _Macbeth_, Act II. Scene 3.
_The following speech._ Sheridan’s speech in reply to Lord
Mornington on the war with France, Jan. 21, 1794.
_Mr. Grattan._ Speech on moving an Address to the Throne,
containing a Declaration of Rights, April 16, 1782.
425. _‘Where each alley,’ etc._ Pope, _Moral Essays_, IV. 117–8.
_Non omnia possumus omnes._ Virgil, _Eclogues_, VIII. 63.
_Mr. Horne Tooke._ Speech on the eligibility of clergymen to sit
in Parliament (1801).
-----
Footnote 1:
As to the _real_ grounds and views on which the former coalitions were
begun and carried on, see Burke’s Regicide Peace, Second Part.
Footnote 2:
One instance may serve as an example for all the rest:—When Mr. Fox
last summer predicted the failure of the new confederacy against
France, from a consideration of the circumstances and relative
situation of both parties, that is, from an exact knowledge of the
actual state of the case, Mr. Pitt contented himself with
answering—and, as in the blindness of his infatuation he seemed to
think quite satisfactorily,—‘That he could not assent to the
honourable gentleman’s reasoning, for that it went to this, that we
were never to attempt to mend the situation of our affairs, because in
so doing we might possibly make them worse.’ No; it was not on account
of this abstract possibility in human affairs, or because we were not
absolutely sure of succeeding (for that any child might know), but
because it was in the highest degree probable, or _morally_ certain
that the scheme would fail, and leave us in a worse situation than we
were before, that Mr. Fox disapproved of the attempt. There is in this
a degree of weakness and imbecility, a defect of understanding
bordering on idiotism, a fundamental ignorance of the first principles
of human reason and prudence, that in a great minister is utterly
astonishing, and almost incredible. Nothing could ever drive him out
of his dull forms, and naked generalities; which as they are
susceptible neither of degree nor variation, are therefore equally
applicable to every emergency that can happen: and in the most
critical aspect of affairs he saw nothing but the same flimsy web of
remote possibilities and metaphysical uncertainty. In his mind the
wholesome pulp of practical wisdom and salutary advice was immediately
converted into the dry chaff and husks of a miserable logic.
Footnote 3:
I would recommend to the reader a masterly and unanswerable essay on
this subject in the Morning Post, by Mr. Coleridge, in February 1800,
from which, and the conversation of the author, most of the above
remarks are taken. I will only add, that it is the property of true
genius to force the admiration even of enemies. No one was ever hated
or envied for his powers of mind, if others were convinced of their
real excellence. The jealousy and uneasiness produced in the mind by
the display of superior talents almost always arises from a suspicion
that there is some trick or deception in the case, and that we are
imposed on by an appearance of what is not really there. True warmth
and vigour communicate warmth and vigour; and we are no longer
inclined to dispute the inspiration of the oracle, when we feel the
‘presens Divus’ in our own bosoms. But when, without gaining any new
light or heat, we only find our ideas thrown into perplexity and
confusion by an art that we cannot comprehend, this is a kind of
superiority which must always be painful, and can never be cordially
admitted. For this reason the extraordinary talents of Mr. Pitt were
always viewed, except by those of his own party, with a sort of
jealousy, and _grudgingly_ acknowledged; while those of his rivals
were admitted by all parties in the most unreserved manner, and
carried by acclamation.
Footnote 4:
Mr. Burke pretends in this Jesuitical Appeal, that a nation has a
right to insist upon and revert to old establishments and prescriptive
privileges, but not to lay claim to new ones; in a word, to change its
governors, if refractory, but not its form of government, however bad.
Thus he says we had a right to cashier James II., because he wished to
alter the laws and religion as they were then established. By what
right did we emancipate ourselves from popery and arbitrary power a
century before? He defends his consistency in advocating the American
Revolution, though the rebels, in getting rid of the reigning branch
of the Royal Family, did not send for the next of kin to rule over
them ‘in contempt of their choice,’ but prevented all such
equivocations by passing at once from a viceroyalty to a republic. He
also extols the Polish Revolution as a monument of wisdom and virtue
(I suppose because it had not succeeded), though this also was a total
and absolute change in the frame and principles of the government, to
which the people were in this case bound by no feudal tenure or divine
right. But he insists that the French Revolution was stark-naught,
because the people here did the same thing, passed from slavery to
liberty, from an arbitrary to a constitutional government, to which
they had, it seems, no prescriptive right, and therefore, according to
the appellant, no right at all. Oh nice professor of humanity! We had
a right to turn off James II. because he broke a compact with the
people. The French had no right to turn off Louis XVI. because he
broke no compact with them, for he had none to break; in other words,
because he was an arbitrary despot, tied to no laws, and they a herd
of slaves, and therefore they were bound, by every law divine and
human, always to remain so, in perpetuity and by the grace of God! Oh
unanswerable logician!
Footnote 5:
There is none of this perplexity and jarring of different objects in
the tools of power. Their jealousies, heart-burnings, love of
precedence, or scruples of conscience, are made subservient to the
great cause in which they are embarked; they leave the amicable
division of the spoil to the powers that be; all angry disputes are
hushed in the presence of the throne, and the corrosive, fretful
particles of human nature fly off, and are softened by the influence
of a court atmosphere. Courtiers hang together like a swarm of bees
about a honeycomb. Not so the Reformers; for they have no honeycomb to
attract them. It has been said that Reformers are often indifferent
characters. The reason is, that the ties which bind most men to their
duties—habit, example, regard to appearances—are relaxed in them; and
other and better principles are, as yet, weak and unconfirmed.
Footnote 6:
The above criticism first appeared in the _Courier_ newspaper, and was
copied the next day in the _Chronicle_ with the following
remarks:—‘The treasury journals complain of the harsh treatment shewn
to ministers,—let us see how they treat their opponents. If the
following does not come from the poetical pen of the Admiralty
_Croaker_, it is a close imitation of his style.’
‘Strange that such difference should be
’Twixt Tweedledum and Tweedledee!’
Whether it was from the fear of this supposed formidable critic, the
noble Marquis ceased from this time nightly to ‘fillip the ears of his
auditors with a three-man beetle!‘
Footnote 7:
As he is fond of the good old times before the Revolution, the writer
might go still farther back to that magnanimous undertaking, concerted
and executed by the same persons of honour, the partition of Poland.
Footnote 8:
See remarks on Judge Eyre’s Charge to the Jury, 1794, by W. Godwin.
Footnote 9:
Observe that these critically destructive terms of peace are not
strictly called for by Bonaparte’s persevering and atrocious outrages,
but are at all times rendered necessary by the everlasting enmity of
France.
Footnote 10:
‘In heaven they neither marry nor are given in marriage.’ There is
nothing so provoking as these matter-of-fact Utopia-mongers.
Footnote 11:
The style of Vetus bears the same relation to eloquence that gilded
lead does to gold;—it glitters, and is heavy.
Footnote 12:
He who speaks two languages has no country. The French, when they made
their language the common language of the courts of Europe, gained
more than by all their other conquests put together.
Footnote 13:
See Mr. Canning’s speech on the Jaggernaut.—They manage these things
better in the East (it is to be hoped we shall do so in time here);
otherwise, if there had been any occasion, what pretty Anti-Jacobin
sonnets might not Mr. Canning have written in praise of this
Jaggernaut? Or Mr. Southey, after in vain attempting its overthrow,
might have ‘spun his brains’ into a CARMEN ANNUUM to celebrate his own
defeat. Or Vetus might play off his discovery of the identity of the
strumpet and the goddess Reason, against any disposition to disarm its
power or arrest its progress.
Footnote 14:
Of the facility of realising this devout aspiration of the writer in
_The Times_, we have no exact means of judging by his own statements,
for he one day tells us that ‘there is _nothing_ to hinder Lord
Wellington from marching to Paris, and bringing the Usurper to the
block,’ and the next endeavours to excite the panic fears of his
readers, by telling them, in a tone of equal horror and dismay, ‘That
the _monster_ wields at will the force of forty millions of men.’ The
assertions of these writers have no connection with the real state of
things, but depend entirely on their variable passions, and the
purpose they have in view.
Footnote 15:
We only wish to add one thing, which is, to protest against the
self-importance of such expressions as the following, which occur
often in Vetus’s letters:—‘_The men I speak of were_’ those, &c. ‘This
sentiment never prevailed with _the better sort_.’ This is an
affectation of the worst part of Burke’s style, his assumption of a
parliamentary tone, and of the representation of the voice of some
corporate body. It was bad enough in him; in Vetus it is intolerable.
Footnote 16:
Written originally for the Morning Chronicle.
Footnote 17:
The ignorant will suppose that these are two proper names.
Footnote 18:
‘Carnage is her daughter.’—_Mr. Wordsworth’s Thanksgiving Ode._
Footnote 19:
This article falls somewhat short of its original destination, by our
having been forced to omit two topics, the praise of Bonaparte, and
the abuse of poetry. The former we leave to history: the latter we
have been induced to omit from our regard to two poets of our
acquaintance. We must say they have spoiled sport. One of them has
tropical blood in his veins, which gives a gay, cordial, vinous spirit
to his whole character. The other is a mad wag,—who ought to have
lived at the Court of Horwendillus, with Yorick and Hamlet,—equally
desperate in his mirth and his gravity, who would laugh at a funeral
and weep at a wedding, who talks nonsense to prevent the headache, who
would wag his finger at a skeleton, whose jests scald like tears, who
makes a joke of a great man, and a hero of a cat’s paw. The last is
more than Mr. Garrard or Mr. Turnerelli can do. The busts which these
gentlemen have made of a celebrated General are very bad. His head is
worth nothing unless it is put on his men’s shoulders.
Footnote 20:
See an article on this subject in Mr. Coleridge’s _Friend_.
Footnote 21:
We are somewhat in the situation of _Captain Macheath_ in the
‘Beggar’s Opera.’ ‘The road had done the Captain justice, but the
gaming-table had been his ruin.’ We have been pretty successful on the
high seas; but the Bank have swallowed it all up. The taxes have
outlived the war, trade, and commerce. _They_ are the soul, the
immortal part of the Pitt system.
Footnote 22:
It may be proper to notice, that this article was written before the
Discourse which it professes to criticise had appeared in print, or
probably existed any where, but in repeated newspaper advertisements.
Footnote 23:
This work is so obscure, that it has been supposed to be written in
cypher, and that it is necessary to read it upwards and downwards, or
backwards and forwards, as it happens, to make head or tail of it. The
effect is exceedingly like the qualms produced by the heaving of a
ship becalmed at sea; the motion is so tedious, improgressive, and
sickening.
Footnote 24:
Does this verse come under Mr. C.’s version of _Jus Divinum_?
Footnote 25:
That is, in a sense not used and without any intelligible meaning.
Footnote 26:
If these are the worst passions, there is plenty of them in this
Lay-Sermon.
Footnote 27:
A paper set up at this time by Dr. Stoddart.
Footnote 28:
When this work was first published, the King had copies of it bound in
Morocco, and gave them away to his favourite courtiers, saying, ‘It
was a book which every gentleman ought to read.’
Footnote 29:
Our loyal Editor used to bluster a great deal some time ago about
putting down James Madison, and ‘the last example of democratic
rebellion in America.’ In this he was consistent and logical. Could he
not, however, find out another example of this same principle, by
going a little farther back in history, and coming a little nearer
home? If he has forgotten this chapter in our history, others who have
profited more by it have not. He may understand what we mean, by
turning to the story of the two elder Blifils in _Tom Jones_.
Footnote 30:
_Simon Lee, the old Huntsman_, a tale by Mr. Wordsworth, of which he
himself says,
‘It is no tale, but if you think,
Perhaps a tale you’ll make it.’
In this view it is a tale indeed, not ‘of other times,’ but of these.
Footnote 31:
During the retreat, the king was ever seen where the danger was
greatest. Foremost in the ranks, he continually charged the Austrians
in person. When his affairs grew desperate, it became evident that he
sought for death in the field. At the head of a few of his cavalry,
whom he constantly preceded, he often charged the enemy to their very
cannons’ mouth. How he escaped amidst so many dangers appears
miraculous. He might well say that ‘he had sought death, but had not
been able to find it.’
Footnote 32:
Let no country go about to enslave another with impunity. For out of
the very dregs of rottenness and debasement will arise a low creeping
fog of servility, a stench of corruption to choak the life of liberty,
wherever it comes—a race of fortune-hunting, dastard, busy, hungry,
heartless slaves and blood-suckers, eager to fawn upon power and
trample upon weakness, with no other pretensions than want of
principle, and a hatred of those who possess what they want. Ireland
has given us Castlereagh, Wellington, Burke. Is she not even with us?
Let her smile now from her hundred hills, let her shake with laughter
through her thousand bogs! Ireland, last of the nations, repose in
peace upon thy green western wave! Thou and the world are quits.
Footnote 33:
Here the reader may, if he pleases, read over again the last note.
Footnote 34:
_Encore un coup._ This Duke is an Irishman. Pray, suppose the Allies
were to declare the Protestant succession illegitimate, and the King
of Sardinia, not the Prince Regent, the hereditary proprietor of the
English throne and people in perpetuity and in a right line, would
this annul the validity of his Grace’s grants?
Footnote 35:
Of the three persons that Mr. Coleridge, by a most preposterous
anachronism, has selected to compose his asinine auditory, Mr. Hunt
was at the time in question a boy at school, not _a stripling bard_ of
nineteen or nine and twenty, but a real school-boy ‘declaiming on the
patriotism of Brutus.’ As to Mr. Cobbett, he would at that time, had
they come in his way, with one kick of his hard hoofs, have made a
terrible crash among ‘the green corn’ of Mr. Southey’s Jacobin
Pan’s-pipe, and gone near to knock out the musician’s brains into the
bargain. The second person in this absurd trinity, who certainly
thinks it ‘a robbery to be made equal to the other two,’ was the only
hearer present at the rehearsal of Mr. Southey’s overtures to Liberty
and Equality, and to that ‘long-continued asinine bravura,’ which
rings in Mr. Coleridge’s ears, but which certainly was not
unaccompanied, for he himself was present; and those who know this
gentleman, know that on these occasions he plays the part of a whole
chorus.
Footnote 36:
A sarcastic writer, like Mr. Southey, might here ask, whether it was a
disappointment in sharing the estate of some rich landed proprietor
that made Mr. Southey turn short round to a defence of sinecures and
pensions? We do not know, but here follows a passage, which ‘some
skulking scoundrel’ in the _Quarterly Review_ appears to have aimed at
Mr. Southey’s early opinions and character:—‘As long as the smatterer
in philosophy confines himself to private practice, the mischief does
not extend beyond his private circle—his neighbour’s wife may be in
some danger, and his neighbour’s property also; if the distinctions
between _meum_ and _tuum_ should be practically inconvenient to the
man of free opinions. But when he commences professor of moral and
political philosophy for the benefit of the public—the fables of old
credulity are then verified, his very breath becomes venomous, and
every page which he sends abroad carries with it poison to the
unsuspicious reader.’ Such is the interpretation given by the
anonymous writer to the motives of smatterers in philosophy; this
writer could not be Mr. Southey, for ‘_he_ never imputes evil motives
to men merely for holding the opinions he formerly held,’ such as the
evils of the inequality of property, &c.
Footnote 37:
Not the Editor of this Paper, but the writer of this Article.
Footnote 38:
Perhaps Mr. Southey will inform us some time or other, whether in
Italy also it is the people, and not the Pope, who wants reforming.
Footnote 39:
_Dues_ of Office, we suppose.
Footnote 40:
It is the making light of the distresses and complaints of our
victims, because we have them in our power, that is the principle of
all cruelty and tyranny. Our pride takes a pleasure in the sufferings
our malice has inflicted; every aggravation of their case is a
provocation to new injuries and insults; and their pretensions to
justice or mercy become ridiculous in proportion to their hopelessness
of redress. It was thus that Mother Brownrigg whipped her prentices to
death; and in the same manner our facetious Editor would work himself
up to apply the thumb-screw to any one who was unable to resist the
application, with a few ‘forsooths,’ and other such ‘comfit-makers
wives’ oaths.’
Footnote 41:
That he might be deemed so no longer, Mr. COLERIDGE soon after became
_passionate for war_ himself; and ‘swell’d the war-whoop’ in the
Morning Post. ‘I am not indeed silly enough,’ he says, ‘to take as any
thing more than a violent hyperbole of party debate, Mr. FOX‘s
assertion that _the late war_ (1802) _was a war produced by the_
MORNING POST; or I should be proud to have the words inscribed on my
tomb.’—_Biographia Literaria_, vol. i. p. 212.
Footnote 42:
We never knew but one instance to contradict this opinion. A person
who had only fourpence left in the world, which his wife had put by to
pay for the baking of some meat and a pudding, went and laid it out in
purchasing a new string for a guitar. Some on this occasion quoted the
lines,
‘And ever against _eating_ cares,
Wrap me in soft Lydian airs.’
Footnote 43:
We hope Mr. Southey has not found the truth of the latter part of the
passage. ‘Rich gifts wax poor, when givers prove unkind.’
Footnote 44:
‘And for the Bishops (in Edward VI.‘s days), they were so far from any
such worthy attempts, as that they suffered themselves to be the
common stales to countenance, with their prostituted gravities, every
politick fetch that was then on foot, as oft as the potent Statists
pleased to employ them. Never do we read that they made use of their
authority, and high place of access, to bring the jarring nobility to
Christian peace, or to withstand their disloyal projects: but if a
toleration for Mass were to be begged of the King for his sister Mary,
lest Charles the Fifth should be angry, who but the grave prelates,
_Cranmer_ and _Ridley_, must be sent to extort it from the young King!
But out of the mouth of that godly and royal child, Christ himself
returned such an awful repulse to those halting and time-serving
Prelates, that, after much importunity they went their way, not
without shame and tears.’—_Milton_—_Of Reformation in England, and the
Causes that have hitherto hindered it._
Footnote 45:
This passage is nearly a repetition of what was said before; but as it
contains the sum and substance of all I have ever said on such
subjects, I have let it stand.
Footnote 46:
What is the amount of this right of Mr. Coke’s? It is not greater than
that of the Lords Balmerino and Lovatt to their estates in Scotland,
or to the heads upon their shoulders, the one of which however were
forfeited, and the other stuck upon Temple Bar, for maintaining, in
theory and practice, that James II. had the same right to the throne
of these realms, independently of his merits or conduct, that Mr. Coke
has to his estate at Holkham. So thought they. So did not think George
II.
Footnote 47:
See the description of Gargantua in Rabelais.
Footnote 48:
The Government of Ovando, a Spanish Grandee and Knight of Alcantara,
who had been sent over to Mexico soon after its conquest, exceeded in
treachery, cruelty, wanton bloodshed, and deliberate extortion, that
of all those who had preceded him; and the complaints became so loud,
that Queen Isabel on her death-bed requested that he might be
recalled; but Ferdinand found that Ovando had sent home _much gold_,
and he retained him in his situation.—_See Capt. Burney’s History of
the Buccaneers._
Footnote 49:
See Coleridge’s ‘Friend,’ No. 15.
Footnote 50:
‘I look down towards his feet;
But that’s a fable.’—OTHELLO.
Footnote 51:
‘I have thought it prudent to omit some parts of Mr. Phelim Connor’s
letter. He is evidently an intemperate young man, and has associated
with his cousins, the Fudges, to very little purpose.’
Footnote 52:
‘Somebody (Fontenelle, I believe) has said, that if he had his hand
full of truths, he would open but one finger at a time; and I find it
necessary to use the same sort of reserve with respect to Mr. Phelim
Connor’s very plain-spoken letters. The remainder of this Epistle is
so full of unsafe matter of fact, that it must, for the present at
least, be withheld from the public.’
Footnote 53:
‘To commemorate the landing of Louis le Desiré from England, the
impression of his foot is marked out upon the pier at Calais, and a
pillar with an inscription raised opposite to the spot.’
Footnote 54:
This character was written in a fit of extravagant candour, at a time
when I thought I could do justice, or more than justice, to an enemy,
without betraying a cause.
Footnote 55:
For instance: he produced less effect on the mob that compose the
English House of Commons than Chatham or Fox, or even Pitt.
Footnote 56:
As in the comparison of the British Constitution to the ‘proud keep of
Windsor,’ &c. the most splendid passage in his works.
Footnote 57:
If I had to write a character of Mr. Fox at present, the praise here
bestowed on him would be ‘craftily qualified.’ His life was deficient
in the three principal points, the beginning, the middle, and the end.
He began a violent Tory, and became a flaming patriot out of private
picque; he afterwards coalesced with Lord North, and died an
accomplice with Lord Grenville. But—_what I have written, I have
written_. So let it pass.
Footnote 58:
See an excellent character of Fox by a celebrated and admirable
writer, which appeared in the _Morning Chronicle_, November, 1806,
from which this passage is taken as nearly as I could recollect it.
Footnote 59:
There is an admirable, judicious, and truly useful remark in the
preface to Spenser (not by Dr. Johnson, for he left Spenser out of his
poets, but by _one_ Upton,) that the question was not whether a better
poem might not have been written on a different plan, but whether
Spenser would have written a better one on a different plan. I wish to
apply this to Fox’s _ungainly_ manner. I do not mean to say, that his
manner was the best possible, (for that would be to say that he was
the greatest man conceivable), but that it was the best for him.
Footnote 60:
This may seem to contradict what I have before said of Chatham—that he
spoke like a man who was discharging a duty, &c. but I there spoke of
the tone he assumed, or his immediate feelings at the time, rather
than of the real motives by which he was actuated.
Footnote 61:
To this character none of those who could be compared with him in
talents had the least pretensions, as Chatham, Burke, Pitt, &c. They
would _blackguard_ and bully any man upon the slightest provocation,
or difference of opinion.
Footnote 62:
One instance may serve as an example for all the rest:—When Mr. Fox
last summer (1805) predicted the failure of the new confederacy
against France, from a consideration of the circumstances and relative
situation of both parties, that is, from an exact knowledge of the
actual state of things, Mr. Pitt contented himself with answering—and,
as in the blindness of his infatuation, he seemed to think quite
satisfactorily,—‘That he could not assent to the honourable
gentleman’s reasoning, for that it went to this, that we were never to
attempt to mend the situation of our affairs, because in so doing we
might possibly make them worse.’ No; it was not on account of this
abstract possibility in human affairs, or because we were not
absolutely sure of succeeding (for that any child might know), but
because it was in the highest degree probable, or _morally_ certain,
that the scheme would fail, and leave us in a worse situation than we
were before, that Mr. Fox disapproved of the attempt. There is in this
a degree of weakness and imbecility, a defect of understanding
bordering on idiotism, a fundamental ignorance of the first principles
of human reason and prudence, that in a great minister is utterly
astonishing, and almost incredible. Nothing could ever drive him out
of his dull forms, and naked generalities; which, as they are
susceptible neither of degree nor variation, are therefore equally
applicable to every emergency that can happen: and in the most
critical aspect of affairs, he saw nothing but the same flimsy web of
remote possibilities and metaphysical uncertainty. In his mind the
wholesome pulp of practical wisdom and salutary advice was immediately
converted into the dry chaff and husks of a miserable logic.
Footnote 63:
I do remember one passage which has some meaning in it. At the time of
the Regency Bill, speaking of the proposal to take the King’s servants
from him, he says, ‘What must that great personage feel when he waked
from the trance of his faculties, and asked for his attendants, if he
were told that his subjects had taken advantage of his momentary
absence of mind, and stripped him of the symbols of his personal
elevation.’ There is some grandeur in this. His admirers should have
it inscribed in letters of gold; for they will not find another
instance of the same kind.
Footnote 64:
I would recommend to the reader a masterly and unanswerable essay on
the subject, in the Morning Post, by Mr. Coleridge, (see above) from
which most of the above remarks are taken. See also Dr. Beddoes’s
Letter on the public merits of Mr. Pitt. I will only add, that it is
the property of true genius, to force the admiration even of enemies.
No one was ever hated or envied for his powers of mind, if others were
convinced of their real excellence. The jealousy and uneasiness
produced in the mind by the display of superior talents almost always
arises from a suspicion that there is some trick or deception in the
case, and that we are imposed on by an appearance of what is not
really there. True warmth and vigour communicate warmth and vigour;
and we are no longer inclined to dispute the inspiration of the
oracle, when we feel the ‘_presens Divus_’ in our own bosoms. But
when, without gaining any new light or heat, we only find our ideas
thrown into perplexity and confusion by an art that we cannot
comprehend, this is a kind of superiority which must always be
painful, and can never be cordially admitted. For this reason the
extraordinary talents of Mr. Pitt were always viewed, except by those
of his own party, with a sort of jealousy, and _grudgingly_
acknowledged; while those of his rivals were admitted by all parties
in the most unreserved manner, and carried by acclamation.
Footnote 65:
The prevalence of this check may be estimated _by the general
proportion_ of virtue and happiness in the world, for if there were no
such check, there could be nothing but vice and misery.
Footnote 66:
Written in 1807, at a time when Mr. Whitbread’s scheme was in
agitation in the House of Commons, and Mr. Malthus used to wait in the
lobbies with his essay in his hand, for the instruction and
compliments of Honourable Members. The above article is taken from a
Reply to Mr. Malthus, one of my very early Essays, the style of which
is, I confess, a little exuberant, but of the arguments I see no
reason to be ashamed.
Footnote 67:
Altered in the last edition, to ‘suffer.’
Footnote 68:
Daughter of Marie Antoinette. Burke’s ‘romantic episode’ is in
‘Reflections on the Revolution in France’ (_Select Works_, ed. Payne,
II. 89).
Footnote 69:
From _L’Allegro_, 139.
Footnote 70:
Birch’s, No. 15 Cornhill. Samuel Birch (1757–1841), the proprietor,
was Lord Mayor 1814–15. The shop (now famous for turtle soup) still
retains some old features.
Footnote 71:
_Othello._ Act IV. Scene 2.
Footnote 72:
_Hamlet_, Act IV. Scene 2.
Footnote 73:
Cowper, _The Task_ III. 113.
Printed by T. and A. CONSTABLE, (late) Printers to Her Majesty at the
Edinburgh University Press
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
1. P. 423, changed “as this is a subject which I do not not understand,
I must leave it to the lawyers” to “as this is a subject which I
do not understand, I must leave it to the lawyers”.
2. P. 441, changed “rifacciamento” to “rifacimento”.
3. Silently corrected typographical errors and variations in spelling.
4. Retained anachronistic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings as
printed.
5. Footnotes have been re-indexed using numbers and collected together
at the end of the last chapter.
6. Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.
*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The collected works of William Hazlitt, Vol. 03 (of 12)" ***
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