Knight's Progress of Civil Society was pompous
and humourless; Darwin's machine-turned couplets glittered with
a profusion of inappropriate poetical trappings.
and humourless; Darwin's machine-turned couplets glittered with
a profusion of inappropriate poetical trappings.
Cambridge History of English Literature - 1908 - v11
Philo-
sophy was not so much the foe of his latter days as Jacobinism ;
and Jacobinism was simply Macchiavellism come back to fill the
void which the failure of philosophy had created. It may be that,
in his defence of moral prejudices and inherited institutions, he
sometimes mistook the unessential for the vital; that his too
passionate sensibility rendered his conduct at times factious,
unjust and unwise. He brought into politics the faults as well as
the genius of a man of letters and a prophet. When all is said,
his is one of the greatest minds which have concerned themselves
with political topics, and, alike, the substance and the form of his
works have made him the only orator whose speeches have secured
for themselves a permanent place in English literature beside
what is greatest in our drama, our poetry and our prose. Of his
many literary and artist friends, Johnson, Goldsmith, Reynolds and
others, the foremost is Johnson. They differed radically in party
politics, but they were knit together by a practical philosophy
rooted in common sense and religious feeling.
ulichte
Te voy
DE
Team
1 The k
triumph
the
sritton
數值:
is the
## p. 33 (#55) ##############################################
CHAPTER II
POLITICAL WRITERS AND SPEAKERS
THE growth and improvement of the daily newspaper, in itself
not a strictly literary event, had a natural and marked effect on
political literature. In some ways, that effect was merely tem-
porary. The supersession of the weekly essay, of The North
Briton type, by the effusions of the letter-writers of 1760—75 in
a genuine newspaperl was soon cancelled; for the newspapers
introduced a daily essay, the leading article, and letter-writers
sank into the subordinate rôle they have held ever since. But, in
political verse, a more permanent effect of the new conditions is
noticeable. In 1760, we have still the pamphlet-poem and the
decadent ballad. Some twenty years later, beside these there
flourishes an almost new form, that of light, short, satiric verse,
altogether slighter in immediate purpose and more playfully
teasing in its objects and manner than its predecessors. It has
flourished in the nineteenth century and has been marked by an
ever-increasing attention to form, ending in a lyric precision
surpassing, in some cases, that of serious poetry. For long,
however, this new kind of verse was barely aware of its own
existence, and wavered tentatively in methods and in choice of
models; and, as often happens, in its careless youth it possessed
a virility and fire not to be found in the perfected elegance of a
later day.
Its rise seems traceable to the year 1784. At that time, the
whigs were smarting under their utter rout in the recent general
election. The king, their enemy, was victorious : the youthful
Pitt was triumphant master of parliament; and revenge, though
trifting and ephemeral, was sweet. The whig lampooners, indeed,
were not without a serious object. The nation had ratified the
king's choice of an administration. The whigs were concerned to
show that the choice was wrong; and, in default of evidence
derived from the acts of Pitt's ministry, they were reduced to
i See vol. x, chap. XVII.
E, L, XI.
3
CH. II.
## p. 34 (#56) ##############################################
34
[CH.
Political Writers and Speakers
merely personal mockery of him and his followers. Ministers
were to be discredited by whig satire, if not by their own actions.
And a number of brilliant devotees of Fox formed themselves
into a club, Esto Perpetua, with the intent to mar the king's
success.
Someone hit on the happy idea of a mock review of a mock
epic, and thus Criticisms of the Rolliad began. The successive
numbers of this production appeared, from time to time, in
The Morning Herald, and won instantaneous popularity; when
collected in book-form, they ran through twenty-two editions.
Each number professed to be a commentary on a new epic that
had just appeared. This mythical composition, The Rolliad, took
its name from one of the chief butts of its wit, John Rolle, M. P.
for Devonshire, whose stolid toryism had latterly found vent in
an attempt to cough down Burke. He was provided with an
ancestor, the Norman duke Rollo, whose adventures were a
burlesque version of the Aeneid, and who, in due course (in the
sixth book), is shown by Merlin in the House of Commons amid
his party friends. The contemporary House of Lords, on the other
hand, is revealed to Rollo by the dying Saxon drummer whom he
has mortally wounded at Hastings. With the advent of fresh
matter for ridicule, fresh editions of the epic were feigned to
appear, and the topical insertions its author was supposed to
make were quoted in prompt reviews, till, at last, even the dying
drummer is allowed to die:
Ha! ha! —this soothes me in severest woe;
Ho! ho ! -ah! ah! -oh! oh! --ha! ah! -ho! -oh! ! !
Although their vivacity and wit, very different from Churchill's
solemn tirades and the steely passion of Junius, had captivated
the public, the authors of The Rolliad were too wise to overdo
a happy invention. After a while, they transferred their efforts
to another style of railing. This took the form of Political
Eclogues, where prominent ministerialists lament or strive in
rime after the fashion of the outspoken, yet literary, shepherds of
Vergil. The new vein, in its turn, was worked out, and was
succeeded by a series of Probationary Odes for the laureateship,
vacant by the death of Whitehead in 1785, and filled by the
appointment of Thomas Warton. The victims thus made to submit
specimen odes to the lord chamberlain were by no means chosen
from purely literary circles. Politicians and divines are bur-
lesqued together with poets of lesser rank. To be a supporter of
Pitt was a sufficient ground for the fathership of an ode, in which
>
## p. 35 (#57) ##############################################
11]
The Rolliad
35
the peculiarities of 'the author' were gaily ridiculed. All these
compositions had to submit to some sort of plan, epic, or collection
of eclogues and odes; but, naturally, were accompanied by a
number of scattered jeux d esprit which had no such bond of con-
nection between them. They were afterwards republished as
Political Miscellanies, and, never very amusing, grew duller and
feebler as the zeal of The Rolliad clique declined.
Not many of the members of the Esto Perpetua club, who took
part in this baiting, were of the first rank of politicians. Two
of them, and two only, were ex-ministers : general Richard
Fitzpatrick, man of fashion and intimate of Fox, whose cheerful
countenance' and 'gay voice' are curiously apparent in his
printed page, and Lord John Townshend, less jovial but quite as
witty. Of higher literary eminence was the antiquary George
Ellis, a harbinger, in his way, of the so-called romantic movement.
Other members were journalists, of whom Joseph Richardson was
the chief; wbile French Laurence was professor of civil law at
Oxford, and Richard Tickell a librettist of repute. The names
now appeal to few; the importance of The Rolliad's creators,
in spite of their ability, was as fugitive as their verses ; but,
working in unison, they obtained a collective interest otherwise
denied them.
Nice respects and goodnature were not to be expected and
not called for in the rough and tumble of political battle ; but
the vindictive feelings of the ousted whigs spurred them on, some-
times, to venomous railing and, sometimes, to scurrility, and it
is characteristic of The Rolliad that personalities and barbed
gossip not only abound but form nearly the whole of its matter.
One and all of its authors are irresistibly diverted from the
public demerits of their quarry to his mannerisms, his oddities
and his private life. Pitt's continence and the dissoluteness of
Dundas, the piety of one minister, the profanity of another, any.
thing personal, in fact, form the staple of the jokes. Yet it is
impossible not to relish the humorous satire of Ellis's critique
on Pitt's style of eloquence or the similar squib by Laurence:
crisply nice
The muffin-toast, or bread and butter slice,
Thin as his arguments, that mock the mind,
Gone, ere you taste,-no relish left behind.
A whole gallery of caricatured portraits comes before us, each
touched with party malice and etched with cypical knowledge.
342
## p. 36 (#58) ##############################################
36
[CH.
Political Writers and Speakers
On one occasion, for instance, Richardson explored the kitchen of
the parsimonious duke of Richmond:
Whether thou go'st while summer suns prevail,
To enjoy the freshness of thy kitchen's gale,
Where, unpolluted by luxurions heat,
Its large expanse affords a cool retreat.
It is one of the merits of The Rolliad to have abandoned the
tragedy airs and desperate wrath of the political satire that
immediately preceded it. Severe and rasping as are its flouts,
they seldom lose the tone of club-room pleasantry, and its rimed
heroics recall Gay’s Eclogues rather than the polished verse of
Pope. Being so much concerned with the personal foibles of
forgotten men, its lines, for the most part, fall flat on a later
generation, since they lack the finish which would make them
interesting. The exceptions, like Fitzpatrick's couplets on the
bishops,
Who, still obedient to their Maker's nod,
Adore their Sov'reign, and respect their God-
are few and far between. Very seldom is any squib complete in
the verse alone; they are supported by a less epigrammatic raillery
in the prose comment; which, however, for humour and sly fun,
not infrequently surpasses the satire it is supposed to criticise.
To nothing more, perhaps, was The Rolliad indebted for its
success than to the high spirits of its authors. They were gay;
they seem to accompany their jokes with an infectious laugh. In
consequence, the longer we read them, the more we fall into their
humour; and their thin voices seem to gather volume as one
after another takes up the theme and adds his quota to the
burlesque. This may be one reason why the five Political
Eclogues, in continuous verse and isolated in subject, have lost
their savour, with the exception of Fitzpatrick's immortal Lyars,
where two of Pitt's henchmen strive for the prize of mendacity.
But, in The Probationary Odes, all ringing changes on the same
caricature, they regain audience, whether it is George Ellis
scoffing :
Oh! deep unfathomable Pitt!
To thee Ierne owes her happiest days!
Wait a bit,
And all her sons shall loudly sing thy praise !
Ierne, happy, happy Maid!
Mistress of the Poplin trade!
1 Probably suggested by Dryden's line : “Cool were his kitchens though his brain
were hot. ” Absalom and Achitophel, 1, l. 621.
## p. 37 (#59) ##############################################
11]
Peter Pindar
37
or another of the club penning an Ossianic duan :
A song shall rise !
Every soul shall depart at the sound! ! !
The wither'd thistle shall crown my head! ! !
I behold thee, O King!
I behold thee sitting on mist! ! !
Thy form is like a watery cloud,
Singing in the deep like an oyster! ! ! !
This admirable fooling was succeeded by the still more
amusing drolleries of a clerical black sheep, whose real talent,
allied with certain respectable qualities, is obscured by his sordid
life and offensive compositions. Peter Pindar was the pseudonym
of John Wolcot, a country surgeon's son, who hovered during a long
life on the dubious confines of society and Bohemia. He began
his career as a physician, but, while well employed in Jamaica, was
ordained in the hope of a living. Later, when practising as a
.
doctor in his native county Cornwall, he discovered the painter
Opie, helped to train him and came with him to London in 1781.
He was to receive half Opie's profits, and they soon quarrelled.
Wolcot's good judgment in art and his skill in minor verse, how-
ever,
enabled him to make an income by a series of severe squibs
on the royal academicians. Thus, he was led to satirise their
patron, the king, and The Rolliad gave him the cue for further
achievements in the same style. In 1785, he scored considerable
success in his mock-heroic poem, The Lousiad, which now, at
least, reads very tediously. He followed this up, in 1787, by his
profitable Ode upon Ode; it had an enormous, and, in a way,
deserved, vogue. The absurdities of the yearly official ode-writing
and the painful vagaries, together with some real faults, of
George III were well known; and Wolcot, hampered by few
convictions and fewer scruples, found a ready market among in-
dignant whigs for his small scandal. What with legal threats and
negotiations for a pension, which broke down, he decided, in two
or three years, to choose less potent objects of attack; but he
found his profits dwindle, and returned to the king and Pitt in
1792. His powers, of no uncommon vigour at best, were, however,
waning; he was worsted by the surly Gifford, both in fisticuffs and
in abusive verse.
His later satire and his serious rimes were not
of any merit, and he subsisted on a fortunate sale of his copyrights.
When blindness overtook him, he displayed a stoical good humour,
which makes us regret that a musical, artistic man, of a 'kind
and hearty disposition,' played so scurvy a literary role.
## p. 38 (#60) ##############################################
38
[CH.
Political Writers and Speakers
Peter Pindar's verse is not of the kind that appears in antho-
logies, from which the immense length of his rambling drollery
tends to bar him out. Still, the nature of his talent is the chief
reason for his exclusion. He lacks altogether elect phrase,
musical rhythm and any charm of imagination or thought. He
sins constantly in baseness and vulgarity. As an imitator of La
Fontaine, whose irregular verse was his chief model, and as a
precursor of The Ingoldsby Legends, he takes a position of hope-
less inferiority. None the less, one cannot but admire his positive
.
ability. A mixture of good sense and mischievousness transpires
successfully through his elaborately roguish airs. His shrewd hits
at the king's stinginess and obtuseness went home. He is, perhaps,
the very best of English caricaturists in verse, reaching his highest
in his account of the royal visit to Whitbread's brewery!
In its kind, it was delicate work; the lines of his drawing are very
little out of their natural position; but the whole forms a glaring
comic exaggeration. Bozzy and Piozzi, the amoebean strife of
the two worshippers of Dr Johnson in rimed quotations from
their books, is another masterpiece in this style. Each absurdity
of his two victims is emphasised with an adroit legerdemain
of words, and Woleot, for once, suppresses his irritating snigger.
The pair are left to tell their own tale. Bozzy, for instance,
says:
But to return unto my charming child-
About our Doctor Johnson she was wild;
And when he left off speaking, she would flutter,
Squall for him to begin again, and sputter!
And to be near him a strong wish express'd,
Which proves he was not such a horrid beast.
As appears in this instance, Peter Pindar's strength lies in his
power of realising for his reader a comic situation; polished
epigram and the keener arrows of wit are not in his quiver. He
loves to slip one or two sly colloquialisms into verses written in
the formal eighteenth century style, and, thus, brings out the
broad fun of his conceptions. But his tricky method could only
secure a temporary success; and, since his humour was not many-
sided and depended on one or two foibles in his subject, he lost
his hold on the public, when his lucky pocket of ore was exhausted.
Nor could the scolding, dull invective, to which he then resorted,
restore his popularity in an age that, after 1789, became engrossed
in greater matters than the tattle of the servants' hall at Windsor.
1 Instructions to a celebrated Laureat.
## p. 39 (#61) ##############################################
11]
The Anti-Jacobin
39
The French revolution was essentially a proselytising move-
ment. Republicanism, liberty, equality and fraternity, became a
kind of creed, which was zealously propagated by pen and sword.
Thus, the opposition to it in England was, at the same time, an
effort to maintain the ancient social order, with its ideals and
institutions, and a struggle to preserve national independence from
the universal aggressions of the new France. And the champion
of both endeavours was the younger Pitt. The times seemed to
grow more and more dangerous. In 1797, cash payments were sus-
pended at the Bank of England ; seamen were mutinying at the
Nore; Ireland was seething with discontent; the French arms were
victorious against their continental foes; while, in England itself,
a violent revolutionary propaganda was being carried on, which,
if it were more potent in appearance than in real significance, might
still decoy the younger generation. It was to combat this propa-
ganda and to hearten the national resistance that George Canning,
Pitt's ablest lieutenant, founded his periodical, The Anti-Jacobin.
The new journal, in addition to the customary contents of a news-
paper, was to contradict systematically the statements of the
other side, to ridicule any prominent person well-disposed towards
the revolution, and to hold up to honour the old ideals of English
polity. These objects it fulfilled. In contrast to its trivial pre-
decessors, The Anti-Jacobin breathed a proud conviction and a
religious fervour which lift it above mere party polemics. It is,
indeed, bigoted in tone; for was it not fighting in the cause of
righteousness and human happiness? To its authors, the favourers
of the revolution are miscreants whom it is necessary to pillory and
deride, and thus to render harmless. They themselves are confessors
of the true political faith.
The men who wrote this fiery periodical may surprise us by
their mundane character. There was the many-sided, brilliant
Canning, then in the heyday of his youth; George Ellis, the
amiable antiquary, by this time, a fervent tory and repentant of
The Rolliad ; and John Hookham Frere, the ideal of a cultivated
country gentleman, whose striking literary achievement it was to
introduce the satiric Italian epic into English. The editor was
a man of literary mark, William Gifford. No one, perhaps, of
the tribe of poor authors has gone through a more bitter struggle
than his with the obstacles and misfortunes in his way, although
they were not spread over a long term of years. He was the son
of a ne'er-do-well, whose main occupation was that of a glazier at
Ashburton in Devonshire. After a miserable boyhood, obsessed
## p. 40 (#62) ##############################################
40
[CH.
Political Writers and Speakers
w
.
by a passionate and seemingly hopeless desire for learning amid
the handicraft work to which he was forced, he was befriended by
William Cookesley, a surgeon, and sent to Oxford by subscription.
While there, he came to the notice of earl Grosvenor, and was
appointed travelling tutor to his son. He was able to make
something of a name, in 1794 and 1795, by his mediocre satires,
The Baviad and The Maeviad, directed against the ridiculous Della
Cruscan school of poets and the small dramatic fry of the day.
Although their merit was not great, his ample quotations from his
victims made his conquest easy. When The Anti-Jacobin was set
on foot, his sledge-hammer style and industry made him a fit editor
for it; but he was mainly concerned with its prose. He did his task
well, and, when The Quarterly Review was started in 1809, he
was selected as its editor, a post he occupied for fifteen years, in
despotic fashion, even finding it in his heart to mutilate an essay
by Lamb. Meanwhile, he did yeoman service to literature by
his translation of Juvenal in 1802 and by some editions of
older English dramatists. Sound common-sense redeems his
commonplace ability, while his sour, fierce criticisms find an ex-
planation in his early hardships and constant ill-health. He
seems to have written verse because it was, then, a regular
accomplishment of literary men.
Even in its own day, The Anti-Jacobin was chiefly notable for
its poets' corner, which contained the best political satire since
the age of Dryden. The greater part of these compositions
developed their wit in some form or another of parody. Jacobins
were supposed to write them-Jacobins, who always preferred the
most blatant version of extreme opinions. As usual, the idea was
not quite new. The Rolliad had feigned to be the work of
a ministerialist, and there was an element of parody in Political
Eclogues and in Probationary Odes, although the veil was
exceedingly conventional. Now, in The Anti-Jacobin, caustic
parody was the essence of the satire. Among the earliest
victims was the later tory poet laureate, Southey, who was just
recovering from a severe attack of revolutionary fever. His
conversion did not influence Canning and Frere, if they knew of
it, and to their hostility we owe the verses among which The
Needy Knife-grinder stands chief. Southey's sentimentalism and
his halting accentual sapphics and dactylics were mercilessly
imitated and surpassed. It was not only parody and ridicule
of a particular victim, but humorous mockery of a type of
in
12
lopet
1 See post, chap. VIII.
Women
nh
ins
## p. 41 (#63) ##############################################
6
11]
The Anti-Jacobin
41
thought, and, as such, has continued to live by reason of its
admirable combination of inventive power, metre, phrase and
artful contrast:
Weary Knife-grinder! Little think the proud ones,
Who in their coaches roll along the turnpike-
road, what hard work 'tis crying all day ‘Knives and
Scissars to grind 0! '
The scholarly négligé of the form, the whimsical plight of the
unlucky knife-grinder and the comedy of his 'hard work’ make us
indifferent to the temporary politics which inspired this immortal
skit.
More body, if less bouquet, is to be found in two longer
contributions. It was a time when the genuine muse had retired
to her 'interlunar cave,' and massive didactic poems enjoyed a
transitory reign. Two authors of note took the lead, Richard
Payne Knight and Erasmus Darwin? Both were philosophes
in their opinions and broached a variety of doctrines most
obnoxious to The Anti-Jacobin. And, however invulnerable to
attack they might be in their serious work, they were mortal
in their verse.
Knight's Progress of Civil Society was pompous
and humourless; Darwin's machine-turned couplets glittered with
a profusion of inappropriate poetical trappings. Knight's turn
came first. The Progress of Man traced, with mischievous assur-
ance, the decline of the human race from the days of the blameless
savage, who fed 'on hips and haws. '
Man only,-rash, refined, presumptuous man,
Starts from his rank, and mars creation's plan.
Born the free heir of nature's wide domain,
To art's strict limits bounds his narrow'd reign;
Resigns his native rights for meaner things,
For faith and fetters-laws, and priests, and kings.
Darwin's Loves of the Plants was taken off as The Loves of the
Triangles. The merit of both these parodies consists, not only
in their sparkling wit, but in their genuine exaggeration of the
original authors' foibles. They are not a forced, ridiculous echo;
only the real traits are accentuated to caricature.
Burlesque of the same high rank appears in The Rovers. This
delicious mock-play parodies certain productions of the German
drama, then only beginning to be known in England by trans-
lations. Like its fellow-satires, it derived assistance from the
extravagances to be found in some of the works it derided. These
extravagances differed from one another in kind as well as in degree;
1 See post, chap. VIII.
## p. 42 (#64) ##############################################
42
[ch.
Political Writers and Speakers
-
. .
but Goethe, Schiller and Kotzebue seemed alike fair game to the
satirist, and the result was a spirited farce, which has remained
amusing long after the close of the literary controversy which
was its occasion.
The series of parodies surpass the other poetry of The Anti-
Jacobin in that they were perfect in their kind. None the less,
in absolute merit, they fall behind its most serious piece, The
New Morality. In 1798, The Anti-Jacobin had done its office of
cheapening and discrediting the revolutionary propagandists, and
its gall and licence of satire were in danger of alienating less
fervent supporters. So it was decided to cease its publication.
Canning gathered together all his power for a final, crushing blow.
With but little assistance from his friends, he composed a formal
satire in the manner of Churchill ; and, although The New
Morality is hardly the work of a great poet, yet its sincerity
of passionate conviction, no less than its admirable rhetoric and
skilful versification, raises it above the ill-formed genius of its
model. Canning was not a cosmopolitan philosopher; he was
full of insular patriotism, and produced his best when giving full-
hearted expression to it. From his sneering contempt of sympa-
thisers with France and of halfhearted—perhaps impartial-
*candid friends' of the ministry, he rises, through fierce denun-
ciatory scorn of the French publicists, to an appeal to maintain
the older England of law and right. Burke is his prophet :
Led by thy light, and by thy wisdom wise ;
he urges the claims of the native past
гу:
Guard we but our own hearts; with constant view
To ancient morals, ancient manners true;
True to the manlier virtues, such as nerv'd
Our fathers' breasts, and this proud isle preserv'd
For many a rugged age: and scorn the while
Each philosophic atheist's specious guile;
The soft seductions, the refinements nice,
Of gay Morality, and easy Vice;
So shall we brave the storm; our 'stablish'd pow'r
Thy refuge, EUROPE, in some happier hour.
Thus, The Anti-Jacobin, at its close, bade farewell to the bur-
lesque spirit which had guided political satire since the days of
The Rolliad. The utmost in that style of writing-after all, not
a lofty style, not an important species of literature—had been
achieved, and the exhausted wave drew back again. Canning's
own subsequent political verse, scanty in quantity as it was, never
## p. 43 (#65) ##############################################
11] William Godwin & Mary Wollstonecraft 43
attained the excellence of his contributions to his famous news-
paper; and the successors to The Anti-Jacobin, which borrowed
its title, were unable to supply verse of real merit.
a
One of the butts of The Anti-Jacobin, who was treated with
a tolerant good-humour which he well deserved, was ‘Mr. Higgins
of St. Mary Axe. ' In real life, he was the most extreme of the
English revolutionary philosophers, William Godwin. This amiable
commonplace man, who, however, possessed a marvellous capacity
for reasoning without regard to experience, was born in 1756, a
younger son of a dissenting minister. He obtained his education,
first at a Norfolk grammar school, and then at Hoxton academy
in London. In 1778, he became, in his turn, a minister, but he never
stayed long at one place and soon adopted the more congenial
profession of authorship. Much conscientious, ephemeral work was
done by him in history and literature; but he was brought into
sudden prominence by a book of startling opinions, Political
Justice, published in 1793. The influence of this book was great
among the younger generation, which, indeed, Godwin was
naturally able to attract and advise in private life as well as
by political speculation. His kindly sympathy and almost boyish
optimism were never better applied than in his friendships with
young men. Bred a Calvinist, he had become a believer in
materialism and necessity, passing, in 1792, to atheism, and re-
nouncing it somewhere about 1800. He was, above all things, a
system-maker ; philosophy and politics were, for him, indistinguish-
able; and, of his views on both, he was an eager advocate in
public and private, whenever he had the opportunity. Meanwhile,
he was obliged to earn a living besides propagating his opinions.
So, we find him writing proselytising novels, Caleb Williams and
St Leon, which he hoped would insinuate his views in the public
mind. During these years, he met and married another writer of
innovating beliefs. Mary Wollstonecraft, to use her maiden name,
is a far more attractive person than her placid husband. She was
of Irish extraction, and had the misfortune to be one of the
children of a ne'er-do-well. In 1780, at the age of twenty, Mary
Wollstonecraft took up the teaching profession, as schoolmistress
and governess. She was almost too successful, for, in 1788, she
lost her post as governess for Lady Kingsborough, in consequence
of her pupils becoming too fond of her. The next four years she
passed as a publisher's hack, till, at last, her Vindication of the
Rights of Woman made her name known in 1792. Shortly after
## p. 44 (#66) ##############################################
44
[CH.
Political Writers and Speakers
-
lie
a
its publication, she made the mistake of her life by accepting the
‘protection’ of Gilbert Imlay, an American, during a residence in
France. Marriage, in her eyes, was a superfluous ceremony,
and
it was not celebrated between her and Imlay, who, in the end,
became unfaithful beyond endurance. Thus, in 1796, she began
single life again in London with a daughter to support. She had
written, in 1794, a successful account of the earlier period of the
French revolution, and her literary reputation was increased by
letters written to Imlay during a Scandinavian tour. Very
quickly, she and Godwin formed an attachment, which, in ac-
cordance with their principles, only led to marriage in 1797 in
order to safeguard the interests of their children. But the birth
of a child, the future wife of Shelley, was fatal to the mother, in
September 1797. She had been a generous, impulsive woman,
always affectionate and kind. Godwin's second choice of a wife
was less fortunate and conduced to the unhappy experiences of his
later years, which fill much space in the life of Shelley. Pursued
by debt, borrowing, begging, yet doing his best to earn a living
by a small publishing business, and by the production of children's
books, novels, an impossible play and divers works in literature,
history and economics, he at last obtained a small sinecure, which
freed his later years from pecuniary anxiety. He died in 1836.
While both Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft were rebels
against the established order, and contemned the traditional
usages of mankind, not only as obsolete and calling for improve-
ment, but as, in themselves, of no account, Godwin was, by far, the
greater visionary of the two. Mary Wollstonecraft, in spite of
the pompous energy of her expressions in her Vindication of the
Rights of Woman, was essentially an educational reformer, urging
schemes all of which were, possibly, practicable, if not necessarily
advisable. Girls should be educated in much the same way as
boys, and the two sexes should be taught together. Thus, she
says, women would become genuine companions of men, and would be
be fitted to share in the rights, both civil and political, of which
they were deprived. The opposition which the book aroused,
however, was not only due to its definite proposals, but, also, to Hi
the slashing attack on her own sex, as she conceived it to be, and
to the coarseness with which she described certain social evils.
But it reveals an amiable spirit, characteristic of the writer, and
its fire and somewhat shrill enthusiasm make some amends for the
lack of exact reasoning and the excess of unrestrained, glittering for the
rhetoric. As a landmark in the evolution of social ideas, and a
2011
Hj
The
## p. 45 (#67) ##############################################
11) William Godwin & Mary Wollstonecraft 45
a
sign of revolt against a then prevailing sexual cant, it has an
importance which it cannot be said to possess in literature or,
perhaps, as a statement of historical facts : there was, at the time,
much more education of women, both separate and in conjunction
with the male sex, than she was willing to allow. As a governess,
she had had too vivid an experience of the fine lady and the
conventional miss of the eighteenth century.
The visions of Godwin, however, were visions indeed. He
dreamed of a new-made world, of perfect or nearly perfected
beings with no government, scarcely any cooperation, no laws, no
diseases, no marriage, no trade, only perfect peace secured by a
vigilant, and, in truth, perpetually meddling, public opinion. This
programme, in Godwin's eyes, was rendered practicable by his
views on human nature. Men's actions were due to a process of
reasoning, founded on their opinions, which, in turn, were formed
by a process of reasoning.
'When’a murderer ultimately works up his mind to the perpetration, he
is then most strongly impressed with the superior recommendations of the
conduct he pursues. '
Free-will, he denied : thus, if a man's reason were really convinced,
no doubt remained as to his actions. The reformer, in con-
sequence, was not to be a revolutionary; since, by means of
revolution, he would only introduce measures to which he had been
unable to convert his fellow-countrymen. The real way to change
the world for the better was a continuance of peaceful argument,
wherein truth, naturally having stronger reasons in its favour than
error, would prevail. Incessant discussion would gradually alter
the general opinions of men. Then, the changes he desired would
be made. The obvious counter-argument, that, by his own theory,
error had won in the contest with truth up to his time and that the
actual course of human politics had been a mistake, did not occur
to him ; and the attractiveness of his optimistic outlook combined
with the rigidity of his deductive logic, much incidental shrewd-
ness and a singular force of conviction to gain him a numerous
following. His style, too, deserved some success. He was always
clear and forcible; his sentences convey his exact meaning with-
out effort, and display a kind of composed oratorical effect.
curious contrast to Mary Wollstonecraft, who advocated what
might be described as a practical, if novel, scheme of education
with the enthusiasm of a revolutionary, her husband outlined the
complete wreck of existing institutions, with a Utopia of the
simple life to follow, in a calm philosophising manner, which
In
## p. 46 (#68) ##############################################
46
[CH.
Political Writers and Speakers
ignored even the lukewarm emotions felt by himself. The passion
he lacked was to be supplied, later, by his son-in-law, Shelley.
Godwin's Political Justice escaped suppression owing to the
small number of readers whom a costly book', even one which
passed through several editions, could reach. He gained a larger
audience for his novels, which were intended to lead to the same
convictions. The only one of these which still finds readers is The
Adventures of Caleb Williams, or, Things as They Are, published
in 1794. Here, Godwin is concerned with two aspects of the
same thesis ; first, the oppression which a poor man could suffer
under the existing institutions, and, secondly, the perversion of
character in a member of the ruling class through his acceptance
of the ideals of chivalry. With these ingredients, the tale, as a
whole, is most bizarre. Its personages act in a very unlikely way.
Falkland, the virtuous villain, who, because of a chivalric regard
for his reputation, has allowed two innocent men to be executed
for a murder he bimself committed, shows a persistent ingenuity in
a
harassing his attached dependent, Williams, who has guessed his
secret, into accusing him; a brigand band, led by a philanthropic
outlaw, establishes its headquarters close to a county town; Williams
surpasses the average hero in prodigies of resource and endurance ;
Falkland, in the end, confesses his guilt in consequence of the
energy with which his victim expresses the remorse he feels at
making the true accusation. Yet, with all this, the story is put
together with great skill. In spite of its artificial rhetoric and
their own inherent improbability, there is a human quality in the
characters, and Williams's helplessness in his attempt to escape
from his persecutor gives us the impression, not so much of the
forced situations of a novel, as of unavoidable necessity. In fact,
Godwin's talent as a novelist lay in his remarkable powers of
invention, which were heightened by his matter of fact way of
relating improbabilities. He was partly aware of it, perhaps,
.
and his other important novel, St Leon, attempted the same
feat with impossibilities. But, in spite of a temporary vogue,
it is now only remembered for its portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft,
and the retractation of his theoretic abolition of the charities of
private life. '
a
From Godwin, who, in his worst days, kept round him a tattered
cloak of magnanimity, it is an abrupt change to his fellow-
revolutionary, the coarse-grained, shrewd Thomas Paine. Yet,
1 Its price was three guineas.
## p. 47 (#69) ##############################################
1
II]
Thomas Paine
47
the latter had virtues which were missing in his contemporary.
His public spirit led him to disregard all profit from political
works which had a large sale; he was not a beggar, and the
rewards he was forced to ask from the American governments
were the barest payments on account of admitted services to the
United States. In fact, he was a born pamphleteer, never happy
unless he was divulging his opinions for the welfare of the human
race as he conceived it. Dogmatic and narrow-minded, he was
not a man to be troubled by doubts : the meaning of history, the
best form of government, right and wrong, falsehood and truth, all
seemed quite plain to him, and he had no more hesitation than
Godwin in making a working model of the universe, as he did of the
iron bridge by him invented. It was not till he was well advanced
in middle life that he obtained an opportunity of showing his great
talents. He was the son of a poor Norfolk quaker, and spent all
.
his earlier years in the struggle to make a decent livelihood.
In turn, a staymaker, a seaman, a school-usher, a tobacconist and
an exciseman, he moved from place to place, until he was finally
dismissed from the excise in 1774, and, in the same year, emigrated
to Philadelphia. There, he almost immediately edited The Pennsyl-
vania Magazine and proved at once his literary talent and the
advanced character of his opinions by attacking slavery and
advocating American independence. In 1776, he became famous
by his pamphlet, Common Sense, which he, at. least, looked on as
the principal instrument in consolidating American opinion in
favour of war. Having gained the public ear, he continued the
work of encouraging resistance to English rule by two series of
effective pamphlets, called The Crisis, and was soon recognised
as the leading writer of his new country, while, with charac-
teristic versatility, he also served as a soldier, as secretary to the
congress's foreign committee and as clerk to the Pennsylvania
assembly. Peace brought him moderate rewards and a retire-
ment which he could not endure. He returned to England to
prosecute his mechanical inventions, the fruit of his leisure hours,
and soon became involved anew in politics. The French revolution
proved a fresh turning-point in his career. In 1791–2, he took
up the cudgels against Burke in the two parts of The Rights
of Man. The ability, and, still more, the wide circulation, of
these tracts brought him in danger of arrest, and he fled to France,
where he became a member of Convention, and, after all but
falling a victim to the guillotine, was a founder of the new sect
of theophilanthropists. Then he dropped into obscurity and, in
## p. 48 (#70) ##############################################
48
[CH.
Political Writers and Speakers
1802, went once more to America, only to find that his Age of
Reason, published in 1794–5, had alienated from him almost all
his friends. A thick crop of slanders grew up round him, without,
apparently, any foundation save the fact that he was occasionally
drunk. Still, he kept a bold front to the world, and continued
to write pamphlets almost till his death in 1809.
Paine was a prince of pamphleteers and all his literary talent
seems confined to that end.
His general ideas were of the
simplest, not to say the shallowest ; but he grasped them firmly
and worked them out with a clear and ready logic. His immense
ignorance of history and literature was by no means ill com-
pensated by an intimate knowledge of actual affairs; and his
shrewdness made him a formidable critic even of Burke. His
style was always clear, and, a little rhetoric apart, unaffected.
Quite without charm as it was, his warmth and force and command
of appropriate words made it more than passable. Every now
and then, he falls into sheer vulgarity, which is most noticeable in
his theological writings; but, more usually, he can alternate a
mediocre eloquence with trenchant argumentative composition.
So far as copying the written word was concerned, Paine was quite
original; but, doubtless, he owed much to the debates and casual
conversations in which he took part. In The Rights of Man, he
appears as a narrow doctrinaire; he takes over the theory of the
social contract as the basis for his constructive views, and justifies
revolution, partly on the ground that no generation can bind its
successors, and partly by the argument that the social contract
must be embodied in a formal constitution : where such did not
exist, a mere tyranny prevailed, which had no basis in right. He
was thus, like Godwin, entirely opposed to Burke's doctrine of
prescription. To criticise the faults of the existing state of
things was easy and obvious; but Paine expounded, also, a radical
constructive policy, including parliamentary reform, old age
pensions and a progressive income-tax. With these and other
changes, he looked forward to a broadcloth millennium. The
Age of Reason showed all Paine's qualities and an unusual
abundance of his defects. His want of taste and the almost
complete absence in him of any sense of beauty or grandeur are
as conspicuous as his narrow self-complacency. But his reasoning,
however limited in scope, was shrewd enough. Generally speaking,
he combined a rough historical criticism of the Bible with the
argument that the Jewish and Christian conceptions of the Deity
were incompatible with the deism revealed to man by external
1
## p. 49 (#71) ##############################################
11]
William Cobbett
49
nature and by his own conscience. In this way, the truculent
pamphleteer seems to stand near one of the sources of modern
theology.
The heir to the pamphleteering eminence of Paine was a
man oddly like, and, again, oddly unlike, his predecessor. William
Cobbett, too, rose by his own efforts from the poorer classes. His
father was a small farmer and innkeeper in Hampshire, and he
educated himself with indomitable pluck while he was serving as
a soldier. Owing to his accomplishments, he rose to the rank
of sergeant-major and became a kind of clerk-factotum to his
regiment; but, in 1791, he suddenly obtained his discharge and
attempted to convict several of his former officers of peculation.
No facilities for proof were allowed him and he did not appear at
the court-martial. Instead, he went to France, and, after a short
residence there, occupied in acquiring the language, he emigrated,
like Paine, to Philadelphia. Still following Paine's precedent,
he had not been settled long in America before he took up the
pamphlet-writing trade. Under the apt pseudonym of Peter
Porcupine, he conducted a pro-British and anti-French campaign,
until he was ruined by libel cases and obliged to return to
England, in 1800. He was well received, as
, was natural, in
government circles, and soon started work as a tory freelance.
His first venture, The Porcupine, failed; but his second, Cobbett's
Political Register, a weekly newspaper with long leaders, which
he began in 1802, gained the public ear. At first tory, then inde-
pendent, at last strongly radical, he maintained, till his death, an
influence of which no persecution and no folly could deprive him.
He appealed to the farmer and small trader as no one else could.
The composition of his weekly Register was not his only occu-
pation. Besides other publishing ventures, including Parlia-
mentary Debates, later undertaken by Hansard, and State Trials,
he combined business and enthusiastic pleasure as a model farmer.
All went well until, in 1810, he received a sentence of two
years' imprisonment on account of an invective against military
flogging. He could keep up writing his Register ; but his farm
went to wrack, and he came out heavily in debt. Still, however,
his hold on the public increased, and, when, in 1816, he succeeded
in reducing the price to twopence, the circulation of his paper
rose to over 40,000 copies. A temporary retreat to America did
little to impair the extent of his audience, and, all through the
reign of George IV, he was a leader of political opinion. Books
from his pen, egotistic in character, on farming, on politics, on the
4
2 L, XI.
CH. II.
## p. 50 (#72) ##############################################
50
[CH.
Political Writers and Speakers
conduct of life by the young, appeared one after another, had
their temporary use and still provide specimens of his character
and his literary style. By 1830, his fortunes were reestablished ;
the Reform act opened the doors of parliament to him, and he sat
in the Commons till his death in 1835.
Personal ambition and public spirit had nearly equal shares
in the indomitable Cobbett. Enormously and incorrigibly vain,
pragmatic, busy, bustling, bold,' he loved to be, or to think
himself, the centre of the stage, to lay down the law on every-
thing, to direct, praise or censure everybody, to point out how
things ought to be done, and, best of all, to spar furiously with
those who held opposite opinions. General principles were be-
yond the limit of his faculties; hence, he completely veered
round in bis politics with hardly a suspicion of the fact.
His
explanations of the state of things that he saw round him were
hasty guesses, rapidly matured into unreasoning prejudices. It
was all due to the funded debt and paper money, aggravated by
progressive depopulation (in 1820 ! )! , tithes and the tardy adoption
of his improvements in farming. Yet, he was a shrewd and
accurate observer, and an expert and fair judge of the state
of agriculture and the condition of tillers of the soil. True,
he had much good sense and critical faculty to apply to other
political matters; but, regarding the land, he was always at his
best. Peasant-bred, with a passion for farming, and a most
genuine, if quite unpoetic, love of the open country and all that
it could offer eye or ear, he depicted, with Dutch honesty, the
rural England that he knew how to see, its fertility and beauty,
the misery that had descended on many of its inhabitants, the
decent prosperity remaining to others. And he was master of
a style in which to express his knowledge. It is not one of those
great styles which embalm their authors' memory; but it was
serviceable. He is vigorous, plain and absolutely unaffected. The
aptest words come to him with most perfect ease. His eloquence
springs from vivid insight into the heart of his theme, and from
a native fervour and energy that do not need art to blow them
into flame. Apart from his plebeian virulence, he shows a natural
good taste in writing. The flaccid elegance and pompous rotund
verbiage then in vogue are, by him, left on one side. If he cannot
frame a period, every sentence has its work to do, and every
i Cobbett's determination, in spite of the census returns, to consider the population
as decreasing, is a remarkable instance of the strength of his prejudices. It is true that
he acknowledged the growth of the great towns.
a
## p. 51 (#73) ##############################################
11]
Orators
51
sentence tells. What mars his farmer's Odyssey, Rural Rides, is,
perhaps, the excess of this very disregard for fine writing. They
are notes of what he saw, and notes must often be brief, formless
and disconnected. Imagination and the charm it gives are, indeed,
absent throughout; but his sympathetic realism has an attraction
of its own. He scans the look and manners of the labourers;
he calculates whether they have bacon to eat; he descants on the
capabilities of the soil; and he is able to impress upon his
readers the strength of his interest in these things and of his
enjoyment of field and woods and streams and the palatable
salmon that inhabit the latter. He seems to give an unconscious
demonstration how excellent a tongue English could be for a man,
who saw and felt keenly, to express the facts as he saw them, and
the emotions which possessed him.
The forms of political literature which have been described-
verse and prosè, solemn treatise, pamphlet or weekly essay--all
possess one advantage over oratory. We can judge of their
effectiveness from themselves, as well as from what we are told
about them. Something we may miss in atmosphere which the
contemporary reader enjoyed; but, in all things else, we are
under the same conditions as his. In oratory, however, the case
is different. We have to piece together scattered reminiscences
of those who heard the speaker, and to imagine, as well as we
can, the effective delivery, the charm of voice and gesture, and,
still more, the momentary appropriateness of argument, phrase
and manner which gave life and force to what is now dead or semi-
animate matter. It is hardly possible, in fact, to do justice, long
after, in cold blood, to debating points, for, unlike the hearers,
unlike the speaker himself, we are not strung up, waiting for the
retort to an argument or invective.
sophy was not so much the foe of his latter days as Jacobinism ;
and Jacobinism was simply Macchiavellism come back to fill the
void which the failure of philosophy had created. It may be that,
in his defence of moral prejudices and inherited institutions, he
sometimes mistook the unessential for the vital; that his too
passionate sensibility rendered his conduct at times factious,
unjust and unwise. He brought into politics the faults as well as
the genius of a man of letters and a prophet. When all is said,
his is one of the greatest minds which have concerned themselves
with political topics, and, alike, the substance and the form of his
works have made him the only orator whose speeches have secured
for themselves a permanent place in English literature beside
what is greatest in our drama, our poetry and our prose. Of his
many literary and artist friends, Johnson, Goldsmith, Reynolds and
others, the foremost is Johnson. They differed radically in party
politics, but they were knit together by a practical philosophy
rooted in common sense and religious feeling.
ulichte
Te voy
DE
Team
1 The k
triumph
the
sritton
數值:
is the
## p. 33 (#55) ##############################################
CHAPTER II
POLITICAL WRITERS AND SPEAKERS
THE growth and improvement of the daily newspaper, in itself
not a strictly literary event, had a natural and marked effect on
political literature. In some ways, that effect was merely tem-
porary. The supersession of the weekly essay, of The North
Briton type, by the effusions of the letter-writers of 1760—75 in
a genuine newspaperl was soon cancelled; for the newspapers
introduced a daily essay, the leading article, and letter-writers
sank into the subordinate rôle they have held ever since. But, in
political verse, a more permanent effect of the new conditions is
noticeable. In 1760, we have still the pamphlet-poem and the
decadent ballad. Some twenty years later, beside these there
flourishes an almost new form, that of light, short, satiric verse,
altogether slighter in immediate purpose and more playfully
teasing in its objects and manner than its predecessors. It has
flourished in the nineteenth century and has been marked by an
ever-increasing attention to form, ending in a lyric precision
surpassing, in some cases, that of serious poetry. For long,
however, this new kind of verse was barely aware of its own
existence, and wavered tentatively in methods and in choice of
models; and, as often happens, in its careless youth it possessed
a virility and fire not to be found in the perfected elegance of a
later day.
Its rise seems traceable to the year 1784. At that time, the
whigs were smarting under their utter rout in the recent general
election. The king, their enemy, was victorious : the youthful
Pitt was triumphant master of parliament; and revenge, though
trifting and ephemeral, was sweet. The whig lampooners, indeed,
were not without a serious object. The nation had ratified the
king's choice of an administration. The whigs were concerned to
show that the choice was wrong; and, in default of evidence
derived from the acts of Pitt's ministry, they were reduced to
i See vol. x, chap. XVII.
E, L, XI.
3
CH. II.
## p. 34 (#56) ##############################################
34
[CH.
Political Writers and Speakers
merely personal mockery of him and his followers. Ministers
were to be discredited by whig satire, if not by their own actions.
And a number of brilliant devotees of Fox formed themselves
into a club, Esto Perpetua, with the intent to mar the king's
success.
Someone hit on the happy idea of a mock review of a mock
epic, and thus Criticisms of the Rolliad began. The successive
numbers of this production appeared, from time to time, in
The Morning Herald, and won instantaneous popularity; when
collected in book-form, they ran through twenty-two editions.
Each number professed to be a commentary on a new epic that
had just appeared. This mythical composition, The Rolliad, took
its name from one of the chief butts of its wit, John Rolle, M. P.
for Devonshire, whose stolid toryism had latterly found vent in
an attempt to cough down Burke. He was provided with an
ancestor, the Norman duke Rollo, whose adventures were a
burlesque version of the Aeneid, and who, in due course (in the
sixth book), is shown by Merlin in the House of Commons amid
his party friends. The contemporary House of Lords, on the other
hand, is revealed to Rollo by the dying Saxon drummer whom he
has mortally wounded at Hastings. With the advent of fresh
matter for ridicule, fresh editions of the epic were feigned to
appear, and the topical insertions its author was supposed to
make were quoted in prompt reviews, till, at last, even the dying
drummer is allowed to die:
Ha! ha! —this soothes me in severest woe;
Ho! ho ! -ah! ah! -oh! oh! --ha! ah! -ho! -oh! ! !
Although their vivacity and wit, very different from Churchill's
solemn tirades and the steely passion of Junius, had captivated
the public, the authors of The Rolliad were too wise to overdo
a happy invention. After a while, they transferred their efforts
to another style of railing. This took the form of Political
Eclogues, where prominent ministerialists lament or strive in
rime after the fashion of the outspoken, yet literary, shepherds of
Vergil. The new vein, in its turn, was worked out, and was
succeeded by a series of Probationary Odes for the laureateship,
vacant by the death of Whitehead in 1785, and filled by the
appointment of Thomas Warton. The victims thus made to submit
specimen odes to the lord chamberlain were by no means chosen
from purely literary circles. Politicians and divines are bur-
lesqued together with poets of lesser rank. To be a supporter of
Pitt was a sufficient ground for the fathership of an ode, in which
>
## p. 35 (#57) ##############################################
11]
The Rolliad
35
the peculiarities of 'the author' were gaily ridiculed. All these
compositions had to submit to some sort of plan, epic, or collection
of eclogues and odes; but, naturally, were accompanied by a
number of scattered jeux d esprit which had no such bond of con-
nection between them. They were afterwards republished as
Political Miscellanies, and, never very amusing, grew duller and
feebler as the zeal of The Rolliad clique declined.
Not many of the members of the Esto Perpetua club, who took
part in this baiting, were of the first rank of politicians. Two
of them, and two only, were ex-ministers : general Richard
Fitzpatrick, man of fashion and intimate of Fox, whose cheerful
countenance' and 'gay voice' are curiously apparent in his
printed page, and Lord John Townshend, less jovial but quite as
witty. Of higher literary eminence was the antiquary George
Ellis, a harbinger, in his way, of the so-called romantic movement.
Other members were journalists, of whom Joseph Richardson was
the chief; wbile French Laurence was professor of civil law at
Oxford, and Richard Tickell a librettist of repute. The names
now appeal to few; the importance of The Rolliad's creators,
in spite of their ability, was as fugitive as their verses ; but,
working in unison, they obtained a collective interest otherwise
denied them.
Nice respects and goodnature were not to be expected and
not called for in the rough and tumble of political battle ; but
the vindictive feelings of the ousted whigs spurred them on, some-
times, to venomous railing and, sometimes, to scurrility, and it
is characteristic of The Rolliad that personalities and barbed
gossip not only abound but form nearly the whole of its matter.
One and all of its authors are irresistibly diverted from the
public demerits of their quarry to his mannerisms, his oddities
and his private life. Pitt's continence and the dissoluteness of
Dundas, the piety of one minister, the profanity of another, any.
thing personal, in fact, form the staple of the jokes. Yet it is
impossible not to relish the humorous satire of Ellis's critique
on Pitt's style of eloquence or the similar squib by Laurence:
crisply nice
The muffin-toast, or bread and butter slice,
Thin as his arguments, that mock the mind,
Gone, ere you taste,-no relish left behind.
A whole gallery of caricatured portraits comes before us, each
touched with party malice and etched with cypical knowledge.
342
## p. 36 (#58) ##############################################
36
[CH.
Political Writers and Speakers
On one occasion, for instance, Richardson explored the kitchen of
the parsimonious duke of Richmond:
Whether thou go'st while summer suns prevail,
To enjoy the freshness of thy kitchen's gale,
Where, unpolluted by luxurions heat,
Its large expanse affords a cool retreat.
It is one of the merits of The Rolliad to have abandoned the
tragedy airs and desperate wrath of the political satire that
immediately preceded it. Severe and rasping as are its flouts,
they seldom lose the tone of club-room pleasantry, and its rimed
heroics recall Gay’s Eclogues rather than the polished verse of
Pope. Being so much concerned with the personal foibles of
forgotten men, its lines, for the most part, fall flat on a later
generation, since they lack the finish which would make them
interesting. The exceptions, like Fitzpatrick's couplets on the
bishops,
Who, still obedient to their Maker's nod,
Adore their Sov'reign, and respect their God-
are few and far between. Very seldom is any squib complete in
the verse alone; they are supported by a less epigrammatic raillery
in the prose comment; which, however, for humour and sly fun,
not infrequently surpasses the satire it is supposed to criticise.
To nothing more, perhaps, was The Rolliad indebted for its
success than to the high spirits of its authors. They were gay;
they seem to accompany their jokes with an infectious laugh. In
consequence, the longer we read them, the more we fall into their
humour; and their thin voices seem to gather volume as one
after another takes up the theme and adds his quota to the
burlesque. This may be one reason why the five Political
Eclogues, in continuous verse and isolated in subject, have lost
their savour, with the exception of Fitzpatrick's immortal Lyars,
where two of Pitt's henchmen strive for the prize of mendacity.
But, in The Probationary Odes, all ringing changes on the same
caricature, they regain audience, whether it is George Ellis
scoffing :
Oh! deep unfathomable Pitt!
To thee Ierne owes her happiest days!
Wait a bit,
And all her sons shall loudly sing thy praise !
Ierne, happy, happy Maid!
Mistress of the Poplin trade!
1 Probably suggested by Dryden's line : “Cool were his kitchens though his brain
were hot. ” Absalom and Achitophel, 1, l. 621.
## p. 37 (#59) ##############################################
11]
Peter Pindar
37
or another of the club penning an Ossianic duan :
A song shall rise !
Every soul shall depart at the sound! ! !
The wither'd thistle shall crown my head! ! !
I behold thee, O King!
I behold thee sitting on mist! ! !
Thy form is like a watery cloud,
Singing in the deep like an oyster! ! ! !
This admirable fooling was succeeded by the still more
amusing drolleries of a clerical black sheep, whose real talent,
allied with certain respectable qualities, is obscured by his sordid
life and offensive compositions. Peter Pindar was the pseudonym
of John Wolcot, a country surgeon's son, who hovered during a long
life on the dubious confines of society and Bohemia. He began
his career as a physician, but, while well employed in Jamaica, was
ordained in the hope of a living. Later, when practising as a
.
doctor in his native county Cornwall, he discovered the painter
Opie, helped to train him and came with him to London in 1781.
He was to receive half Opie's profits, and they soon quarrelled.
Wolcot's good judgment in art and his skill in minor verse, how-
ever,
enabled him to make an income by a series of severe squibs
on the royal academicians. Thus, he was led to satirise their
patron, the king, and The Rolliad gave him the cue for further
achievements in the same style. In 1785, he scored considerable
success in his mock-heroic poem, The Lousiad, which now, at
least, reads very tediously. He followed this up, in 1787, by his
profitable Ode upon Ode; it had an enormous, and, in a way,
deserved, vogue. The absurdities of the yearly official ode-writing
and the painful vagaries, together with some real faults, of
George III were well known; and Wolcot, hampered by few
convictions and fewer scruples, found a ready market among in-
dignant whigs for his small scandal. What with legal threats and
negotiations for a pension, which broke down, he decided, in two
or three years, to choose less potent objects of attack; but he
found his profits dwindle, and returned to the king and Pitt in
1792. His powers, of no uncommon vigour at best, were, however,
waning; he was worsted by the surly Gifford, both in fisticuffs and
in abusive verse.
His later satire and his serious rimes were not
of any merit, and he subsisted on a fortunate sale of his copyrights.
When blindness overtook him, he displayed a stoical good humour,
which makes us regret that a musical, artistic man, of a 'kind
and hearty disposition,' played so scurvy a literary role.
## p. 38 (#60) ##############################################
38
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Political Writers and Speakers
Peter Pindar's verse is not of the kind that appears in antho-
logies, from which the immense length of his rambling drollery
tends to bar him out. Still, the nature of his talent is the chief
reason for his exclusion. He lacks altogether elect phrase,
musical rhythm and any charm of imagination or thought. He
sins constantly in baseness and vulgarity. As an imitator of La
Fontaine, whose irregular verse was his chief model, and as a
precursor of The Ingoldsby Legends, he takes a position of hope-
less inferiority. None the less, one cannot but admire his positive
.
ability. A mixture of good sense and mischievousness transpires
successfully through his elaborately roguish airs. His shrewd hits
at the king's stinginess and obtuseness went home. He is, perhaps,
the very best of English caricaturists in verse, reaching his highest
in his account of the royal visit to Whitbread's brewery!
In its kind, it was delicate work; the lines of his drawing are very
little out of their natural position; but the whole forms a glaring
comic exaggeration. Bozzy and Piozzi, the amoebean strife of
the two worshippers of Dr Johnson in rimed quotations from
their books, is another masterpiece in this style. Each absurdity
of his two victims is emphasised with an adroit legerdemain
of words, and Woleot, for once, suppresses his irritating snigger.
The pair are left to tell their own tale. Bozzy, for instance,
says:
But to return unto my charming child-
About our Doctor Johnson she was wild;
And when he left off speaking, she would flutter,
Squall for him to begin again, and sputter!
And to be near him a strong wish express'd,
Which proves he was not such a horrid beast.
As appears in this instance, Peter Pindar's strength lies in his
power of realising for his reader a comic situation; polished
epigram and the keener arrows of wit are not in his quiver. He
loves to slip one or two sly colloquialisms into verses written in
the formal eighteenth century style, and, thus, brings out the
broad fun of his conceptions. But his tricky method could only
secure a temporary success; and, since his humour was not many-
sided and depended on one or two foibles in his subject, he lost
his hold on the public, when his lucky pocket of ore was exhausted.
Nor could the scolding, dull invective, to which he then resorted,
restore his popularity in an age that, after 1789, became engrossed
in greater matters than the tattle of the servants' hall at Windsor.
1 Instructions to a celebrated Laureat.
## p. 39 (#61) ##############################################
11]
The Anti-Jacobin
39
The French revolution was essentially a proselytising move-
ment. Republicanism, liberty, equality and fraternity, became a
kind of creed, which was zealously propagated by pen and sword.
Thus, the opposition to it in England was, at the same time, an
effort to maintain the ancient social order, with its ideals and
institutions, and a struggle to preserve national independence from
the universal aggressions of the new France. And the champion
of both endeavours was the younger Pitt. The times seemed to
grow more and more dangerous. In 1797, cash payments were sus-
pended at the Bank of England ; seamen were mutinying at the
Nore; Ireland was seething with discontent; the French arms were
victorious against their continental foes; while, in England itself,
a violent revolutionary propaganda was being carried on, which,
if it were more potent in appearance than in real significance, might
still decoy the younger generation. It was to combat this propa-
ganda and to hearten the national resistance that George Canning,
Pitt's ablest lieutenant, founded his periodical, The Anti-Jacobin.
The new journal, in addition to the customary contents of a news-
paper, was to contradict systematically the statements of the
other side, to ridicule any prominent person well-disposed towards
the revolution, and to hold up to honour the old ideals of English
polity. These objects it fulfilled. In contrast to its trivial pre-
decessors, The Anti-Jacobin breathed a proud conviction and a
religious fervour which lift it above mere party polemics. It is,
indeed, bigoted in tone; for was it not fighting in the cause of
righteousness and human happiness? To its authors, the favourers
of the revolution are miscreants whom it is necessary to pillory and
deride, and thus to render harmless. They themselves are confessors
of the true political faith.
The men who wrote this fiery periodical may surprise us by
their mundane character. There was the many-sided, brilliant
Canning, then in the heyday of his youth; George Ellis, the
amiable antiquary, by this time, a fervent tory and repentant of
The Rolliad ; and John Hookham Frere, the ideal of a cultivated
country gentleman, whose striking literary achievement it was to
introduce the satiric Italian epic into English. The editor was
a man of literary mark, William Gifford. No one, perhaps, of
the tribe of poor authors has gone through a more bitter struggle
than his with the obstacles and misfortunes in his way, although
they were not spread over a long term of years. He was the son
of a ne'er-do-well, whose main occupation was that of a glazier at
Ashburton in Devonshire. After a miserable boyhood, obsessed
## p. 40 (#62) ##############################################
40
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Political Writers and Speakers
w
.
by a passionate and seemingly hopeless desire for learning amid
the handicraft work to which he was forced, he was befriended by
William Cookesley, a surgeon, and sent to Oxford by subscription.
While there, he came to the notice of earl Grosvenor, and was
appointed travelling tutor to his son. He was able to make
something of a name, in 1794 and 1795, by his mediocre satires,
The Baviad and The Maeviad, directed against the ridiculous Della
Cruscan school of poets and the small dramatic fry of the day.
Although their merit was not great, his ample quotations from his
victims made his conquest easy. When The Anti-Jacobin was set
on foot, his sledge-hammer style and industry made him a fit editor
for it; but he was mainly concerned with its prose. He did his task
well, and, when The Quarterly Review was started in 1809, he
was selected as its editor, a post he occupied for fifteen years, in
despotic fashion, even finding it in his heart to mutilate an essay
by Lamb. Meanwhile, he did yeoman service to literature by
his translation of Juvenal in 1802 and by some editions of
older English dramatists. Sound common-sense redeems his
commonplace ability, while his sour, fierce criticisms find an ex-
planation in his early hardships and constant ill-health. He
seems to have written verse because it was, then, a regular
accomplishment of literary men.
Even in its own day, The Anti-Jacobin was chiefly notable for
its poets' corner, which contained the best political satire since
the age of Dryden. The greater part of these compositions
developed their wit in some form or another of parody. Jacobins
were supposed to write them-Jacobins, who always preferred the
most blatant version of extreme opinions. As usual, the idea was
not quite new. The Rolliad had feigned to be the work of
a ministerialist, and there was an element of parody in Political
Eclogues and in Probationary Odes, although the veil was
exceedingly conventional. Now, in The Anti-Jacobin, caustic
parody was the essence of the satire. Among the earliest
victims was the later tory poet laureate, Southey, who was just
recovering from a severe attack of revolutionary fever. His
conversion did not influence Canning and Frere, if they knew of
it, and to their hostility we owe the verses among which The
Needy Knife-grinder stands chief. Southey's sentimentalism and
his halting accentual sapphics and dactylics were mercilessly
imitated and surpassed. It was not only parody and ridicule
of a particular victim, but humorous mockery of a type of
in
12
lopet
1 See post, chap. VIII.
Women
nh
ins
## p. 41 (#63) ##############################################
6
11]
The Anti-Jacobin
41
thought, and, as such, has continued to live by reason of its
admirable combination of inventive power, metre, phrase and
artful contrast:
Weary Knife-grinder! Little think the proud ones,
Who in their coaches roll along the turnpike-
road, what hard work 'tis crying all day ‘Knives and
Scissars to grind 0! '
The scholarly négligé of the form, the whimsical plight of the
unlucky knife-grinder and the comedy of his 'hard work’ make us
indifferent to the temporary politics which inspired this immortal
skit.
More body, if less bouquet, is to be found in two longer
contributions. It was a time when the genuine muse had retired
to her 'interlunar cave,' and massive didactic poems enjoyed a
transitory reign. Two authors of note took the lead, Richard
Payne Knight and Erasmus Darwin? Both were philosophes
in their opinions and broached a variety of doctrines most
obnoxious to The Anti-Jacobin. And, however invulnerable to
attack they might be in their serious work, they were mortal
in their verse.
Knight's Progress of Civil Society was pompous
and humourless; Darwin's machine-turned couplets glittered with
a profusion of inappropriate poetical trappings. Knight's turn
came first. The Progress of Man traced, with mischievous assur-
ance, the decline of the human race from the days of the blameless
savage, who fed 'on hips and haws. '
Man only,-rash, refined, presumptuous man,
Starts from his rank, and mars creation's plan.
Born the free heir of nature's wide domain,
To art's strict limits bounds his narrow'd reign;
Resigns his native rights for meaner things,
For faith and fetters-laws, and priests, and kings.
Darwin's Loves of the Plants was taken off as The Loves of the
Triangles. The merit of both these parodies consists, not only
in their sparkling wit, but in their genuine exaggeration of the
original authors' foibles. They are not a forced, ridiculous echo;
only the real traits are accentuated to caricature.
Burlesque of the same high rank appears in The Rovers. This
delicious mock-play parodies certain productions of the German
drama, then only beginning to be known in England by trans-
lations. Like its fellow-satires, it derived assistance from the
extravagances to be found in some of the works it derided. These
extravagances differed from one another in kind as well as in degree;
1 See post, chap. VIII.
## p. 42 (#64) ##############################################
42
[ch.
Political Writers and Speakers
-
. .
but Goethe, Schiller and Kotzebue seemed alike fair game to the
satirist, and the result was a spirited farce, which has remained
amusing long after the close of the literary controversy which
was its occasion.
The series of parodies surpass the other poetry of The Anti-
Jacobin in that they were perfect in their kind. None the less,
in absolute merit, they fall behind its most serious piece, The
New Morality. In 1798, The Anti-Jacobin had done its office of
cheapening and discrediting the revolutionary propagandists, and
its gall and licence of satire were in danger of alienating less
fervent supporters. So it was decided to cease its publication.
Canning gathered together all his power for a final, crushing blow.
With but little assistance from his friends, he composed a formal
satire in the manner of Churchill ; and, although The New
Morality is hardly the work of a great poet, yet its sincerity
of passionate conviction, no less than its admirable rhetoric and
skilful versification, raises it above the ill-formed genius of its
model. Canning was not a cosmopolitan philosopher; he was
full of insular patriotism, and produced his best when giving full-
hearted expression to it. From his sneering contempt of sympa-
thisers with France and of halfhearted—perhaps impartial-
*candid friends' of the ministry, he rises, through fierce denun-
ciatory scorn of the French publicists, to an appeal to maintain
the older England of law and right. Burke is his prophet :
Led by thy light, and by thy wisdom wise ;
he urges the claims of the native past
гу:
Guard we but our own hearts; with constant view
To ancient morals, ancient manners true;
True to the manlier virtues, such as nerv'd
Our fathers' breasts, and this proud isle preserv'd
For many a rugged age: and scorn the while
Each philosophic atheist's specious guile;
The soft seductions, the refinements nice,
Of gay Morality, and easy Vice;
So shall we brave the storm; our 'stablish'd pow'r
Thy refuge, EUROPE, in some happier hour.
Thus, The Anti-Jacobin, at its close, bade farewell to the bur-
lesque spirit which had guided political satire since the days of
The Rolliad. The utmost in that style of writing-after all, not
a lofty style, not an important species of literature—had been
achieved, and the exhausted wave drew back again. Canning's
own subsequent political verse, scanty in quantity as it was, never
## p. 43 (#65) ##############################################
11] William Godwin & Mary Wollstonecraft 43
attained the excellence of his contributions to his famous news-
paper; and the successors to The Anti-Jacobin, which borrowed
its title, were unable to supply verse of real merit.
a
One of the butts of The Anti-Jacobin, who was treated with
a tolerant good-humour which he well deserved, was ‘Mr. Higgins
of St. Mary Axe. ' In real life, he was the most extreme of the
English revolutionary philosophers, William Godwin. This amiable
commonplace man, who, however, possessed a marvellous capacity
for reasoning without regard to experience, was born in 1756, a
younger son of a dissenting minister. He obtained his education,
first at a Norfolk grammar school, and then at Hoxton academy
in London. In 1778, he became, in his turn, a minister, but he never
stayed long at one place and soon adopted the more congenial
profession of authorship. Much conscientious, ephemeral work was
done by him in history and literature; but he was brought into
sudden prominence by a book of startling opinions, Political
Justice, published in 1793. The influence of this book was great
among the younger generation, which, indeed, Godwin was
naturally able to attract and advise in private life as well as
by political speculation. His kindly sympathy and almost boyish
optimism were never better applied than in his friendships with
young men. Bred a Calvinist, he had become a believer in
materialism and necessity, passing, in 1792, to atheism, and re-
nouncing it somewhere about 1800. He was, above all things, a
system-maker ; philosophy and politics were, for him, indistinguish-
able; and, of his views on both, he was an eager advocate in
public and private, whenever he had the opportunity. Meanwhile,
he was obliged to earn a living besides propagating his opinions.
So, we find him writing proselytising novels, Caleb Williams and
St Leon, which he hoped would insinuate his views in the public
mind. During these years, he met and married another writer of
innovating beliefs. Mary Wollstonecraft, to use her maiden name,
is a far more attractive person than her placid husband. She was
of Irish extraction, and had the misfortune to be one of the
children of a ne'er-do-well. In 1780, at the age of twenty, Mary
Wollstonecraft took up the teaching profession, as schoolmistress
and governess. She was almost too successful, for, in 1788, she
lost her post as governess for Lady Kingsborough, in consequence
of her pupils becoming too fond of her. The next four years she
passed as a publisher's hack, till, at last, her Vindication of the
Rights of Woman made her name known in 1792. Shortly after
## p. 44 (#66) ##############################################
44
[CH.
Political Writers and Speakers
-
lie
a
its publication, she made the mistake of her life by accepting the
‘protection’ of Gilbert Imlay, an American, during a residence in
France. Marriage, in her eyes, was a superfluous ceremony,
and
it was not celebrated between her and Imlay, who, in the end,
became unfaithful beyond endurance. Thus, in 1796, she began
single life again in London with a daughter to support. She had
written, in 1794, a successful account of the earlier period of the
French revolution, and her literary reputation was increased by
letters written to Imlay during a Scandinavian tour. Very
quickly, she and Godwin formed an attachment, which, in ac-
cordance with their principles, only led to marriage in 1797 in
order to safeguard the interests of their children. But the birth
of a child, the future wife of Shelley, was fatal to the mother, in
September 1797. She had been a generous, impulsive woman,
always affectionate and kind. Godwin's second choice of a wife
was less fortunate and conduced to the unhappy experiences of his
later years, which fill much space in the life of Shelley. Pursued
by debt, borrowing, begging, yet doing his best to earn a living
by a small publishing business, and by the production of children's
books, novels, an impossible play and divers works in literature,
history and economics, he at last obtained a small sinecure, which
freed his later years from pecuniary anxiety. He died in 1836.
While both Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft were rebels
against the established order, and contemned the traditional
usages of mankind, not only as obsolete and calling for improve-
ment, but as, in themselves, of no account, Godwin was, by far, the
greater visionary of the two. Mary Wollstonecraft, in spite of
the pompous energy of her expressions in her Vindication of the
Rights of Woman, was essentially an educational reformer, urging
schemes all of which were, possibly, practicable, if not necessarily
advisable. Girls should be educated in much the same way as
boys, and the two sexes should be taught together. Thus, she
says, women would become genuine companions of men, and would be
be fitted to share in the rights, both civil and political, of which
they were deprived. The opposition which the book aroused,
however, was not only due to its definite proposals, but, also, to Hi
the slashing attack on her own sex, as she conceived it to be, and
to the coarseness with which she described certain social evils.
But it reveals an amiable spirit, characteristic of the writer, and
its fire and somewhat shrill enthusiasm make some amends for the
lack of exact reasoning and the excess of unrestrained, glittering for the
rhetoric. As a landmark in the evolution of social ideas, and a
2011
Hj
The
## p. 45 (#67) ##############################################
11) William Godwin & Mary Wollstonecraft 45
a
sign of revolt against a then prevailing sexual cant, it has an
importance which it cannot be said to possess in literature or,
perhaps, as a statement of historical facts : there was, at the time,
much more education of women, both separate and in conjunction
with the male sex, than she was willing to allow. As a governess,
she had had too vivid an experience of the fine lady and the
conventional miss of the eighteenth century.
The visions of Godwin, however, were visions indeed. He
dreamed of a new-made world, of perfect or nearly perfected
beings with no government, scarcely any cooperation, no laws, no
diseases, no marriage, no trade, only perfect peace secured by a
vigilant, and, in truth, perpetually meddling, public opinion. This
programme, in Godwin's eyes, was rendered practicable by his
views on human nature. Men's actions were due to a process of
reasoning, founded on their opinions, which, in turn, were formed
by a process of reasoning.
'When’a murderer ultimately works up his mind to the perpetration, he
is then most strongly impressed with the superior recommendations of the
conduct he pursues. '
Free-will, he denied : thus, if a man's reason were really convinced,
no doubt remained as to his actions. The reformer, in con-
sequence, was not to be a revolutionary; since, by means of
revolution, he would only introduce measures to which he had been
unable to convert his fellow-countrymen. The real way to change
the world for the better was a continuance of peaceful argument,
wherein truth, naturally having stronger reasons in its favour than
error, would prevail. Incessant discussion would gradually alter
the general opinions of men. Then, the changes he desired would
be made. The obvious counter-argument, that, by his own theory,
error had won in the contest with truth up to his time and that the
actual course of human politics had been a mistake, did not occur
to him ; and the attractiveness of his optimistic outlook combined
with the rigidity of his deductive logic, much incidental shrewd-
ness and a singular force of conviction to gain him a numerous
following. His style, too, deserved some success. He was always
clear and forcible; his sentences convey his exact meaning with-
out effort, and display a kind of composed oratorical effect.
curious contrast to Mary Wollstonecraft, who advocated what
might be described as a practical, if novel, scheme of education
with the enthusiasm of a revolutionary, her husband outlined the
complete wreck of existing institutions, with a Utopia of the
simple life to follow, in a calm philosophising manner, which
In
## p. 46 (#68) ##############################################
46
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Political Writers and Speakers
ignored even the lukewarm emotions felt by himself. The passion
he lacked was to be supplied, later, by his son-in-law, Shelley.
Godwin's Political Justice escaped suppression owing to the
small number of readers whom a costly book', even one which
passed through several editions, could reach. He gained a larger
audience for his novels, which were intended to lead to the same
convictions. The only one of these which still finds readers is The
Adventures of Caleb Williams, or, Things as They Are, published
in 1794. Here, Godwin is concerned with two aspects of the
same thesis ; first, the oppression which a poor man could suffer
under the existing institutions, and, secondly, the perversion of
character in a member of the ruling class through his acceptance
of the ideals of chivalry. With these ingredients, the tale, as a
whole, is most bizarre. Its personages act in a very unlikely way.
Falkland, the virtuous villain, who, because of a chivalric regard
for his reputation, has allowed two innocent men to be executed
for a murder he bimself committed, shows a persistent ingenuity in
a
harassing his attached dependent, Williams, who has guessed his
secret, into accusing him; a brigand band, led by a philanthropic
outlaw, establishes its headquarters close to a county town; Williams
surpasses the average hero in prodigies of resource and endurance ;
Falkland, in the end, confesses his guilt in consequence of the
energy with which his victim expresses the remorse he feels at
making the true accusation. Yet, with all this, the story is put
together with great skill. In spite of its artificial rhetoric and
their own inherent improbability, there is a human quality in the
characters, and Williams's helplessness in his attempt to escape
from his persecutor gives us the impression, not so much of the
forced situations of a novel, as of unavoidable necessity. In fact,
Godwin's talent as a novelist lay in his remarkable powers of
invention, which were heightened by his matter of fact way of
relating improbabilities. He was partly aware of it, perhaps,
.
and his other important novel, St Leon, attempted the same
feat with impossibilities. But, in spite of a temporary vogue,
it is now only remembered for its portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft,
and the retractation of his theoretic abolition of the charities of
private life. '
a
From Godwin, who, in his worst days, kept round him a tattered
cloak of magnanimity, it is an abrupt change to his fellow-
revolutionary, the coarse-grained, shrewd Thomas Paine. Yet,
1 Its price was three guineas.
## p. 47 (#69) ##############################################
1
II]
Thomas Paine
47
the latter had virtues which were missing in his contemporary.
His public spirit led him to disregard all profit from political
works which had a large sale; he was not a beggar, and the
rewards he was forced to ask from the American governments
were the barest payments on account of admitted services to the
United States. In fact, he was a born pamphleteer, never happy
unless he was divulging his opinions for the welfare of the human
race as he conceived it. Dogmatic and narrow-minded, he was
not a man to be troubled by doubts : the meaning of history, the
best form of government, right and wrong, falsehood and truth, all
seemed quite plain to him, and he had no more hesitation than
Godwin in making a working model of the universe, as he did of the
iron bridge by him invented. It was not till he was well advanced
in middle life that he obtained an opportunity of showing his great
talents. He was the son of a poor Norfolk quaker, and spent all
.
his earlier years in the struggle to make a decent livelihood.
In turn, a staymaker, a seaman, a school-usher, a tobacconist and
an exciseman, he moved from place to place, until he was finally
dismissed from the excise in 1774, and, in the same year, emigrated
to Philadelphia. There, he almost immediately edited The Pennsyl-
vania Magazine and proved at once his literary talent and the
advanced character of his opinions by attacking slavery and
advocating American independence. In 1776, he became famous
by his pamphlet, Common Sense, which he, at. least, looked on as
the principal instrument in consolidating American opinion in
favour of war. Having gained the public ear, he continued the
work of encouraging resistance to English rule by two series of
effective pamphlets, called The Crisis, and was soon recognised
as the leading writer of his new country, while, with charac-
teristic versatility, he also served as a soldier, as secretary to the
congress's foreign committee and as clerk to the Pennsylvania
assembly. Peace brought him moderate rewards and a retire-
ment which he could not endure. He returned to England to
prosecute his mechanical inventions, the fruit of his leisure hours,
and soon became involved anew in politics. The French revolution
proved a fresh turning-point in his career. In 1791–2, he took
up the cudgels against Burke in the two parts of The Rights
of Man. The ability, and, still more, the wide circulation, of
these tracts brought him in danger of arrest, and he fled to France,
where he became a member of Convention, and, after all but
falling a victim to the guillotine, was a founder of the new sect
of theophilanthropists. Then he dropped into obscurity and, in
## p. 48 (#70) ##############################################
48
[CH.
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1802, went once more to America, only to find that his Age of
Reason, published in 1794–5, had alienated from him almost all
his friends. A thick crop of slanders grew up round him, without,
apparently, any foundation save the fact that he was occasionally
drunk. Still, he kept a bold front to the world, and continued
to write pamphlets almost till his death in 1809.
Paine was a prince of pamphleteers and all his literary talent
seems confined to that end.
His general ideas were of the
simplest, not to say the shallowest ; but he grasped them firmly
and worked them out with a clear and ready logic. His immense
ignorance of history and literature was by no means ill com-
pensated by an intimate knowledge of actual affairs; and his
shrewdness made him a formidable critic even of Burke. His
style was always clear, and, a little rhetoric apart, unaffected.
Quite without charm as it was, his warmth and force and command
of appropriate words made it more than passable. Every now
and then, he falls into sheer vulgarity, which is most noticeable in
his theological writings; but, more usually, he can alternate a
mediocre eloquence with trenchant argumentative composition.
So far as copying the written word was concerned, Paine was quite
original; but, doubtless, he owed much to the debates and casual
conversations in which he took part. In The Rights of Man, he
appears as a narrow doctrinaire; he takes over the theory of the
social contract as the basis for his constructive views, and justifies
revolution, partly on the ground that no generation can bind its
successors, and partly by the argument that the social contract
must be embodied in a formal constitution : where such did not
exist, a mere tyranny prevailed, which had no basis in right. He
was thus, like Godwin, entirely opposed to Burke's doctrine of
prescription. To criticise the faults of the existing state of
things was easy and obvious; but Paine expounded, also, a radical
constructive policy, including parliamentary reform, old age
pensions and a progressive income-tax. With these and other
changes, he looked forward to a broadcloth millennium. The
Age of Reason showed all Paine's qualities and an unusual
abundance of his defects. His want of taste and the almost
complete absence in him of any sense of beauty or grandeur are
as conspicuous as his narrow self-complacency. But his reasoning,
however limited in scope, was shrewd enough. Generally speaking,
he combined a rough historical criticism of the Bible with the
argument that the Jewish and Christian conceptions of the Deity
were incompatible with the deism revealed to man by external
1
## p. 49 (#71) ##############################################
11]
William Cobbett
49
nature and by his own conscience. In this way, the truculent
pamphleteer seems to stand near one of the sources of modern
theology.
The heir to the pamphleteering eminence of Paine was a
man oddly like, and, again, oddly unlike, his predecessor. William
Cobbett, too, rose by his own efforts from the poorer classes. His
father was a small farmer and innkeeper in Hampshire, and he
educated himself with indomitable pluck while he was serving as
a soldier. Owing to his accomplishments, he rose to the rank
of sergeant-major and became a kind of clerk-factotum to his
regiment; but, in 1791, he suddenly obtained his discharge and
attempted to convict several of his former officers of peculation.
No facilities for proof were allowed him and he did not appear at
the court-martial. Instead, he went to France, and, after a short
residence there, occupied in acquiring the language, he emigrated,
like Paine, to Philadelphia. Still following Paine's precedent,
he had not been settled long in America before he took up the
pamphlet-writing trade. Under the apt pseudonym of Peter
Porcupine, he conducted a pro-British and anti-French campaign,
until he was ruined by libel cases and obliged to return to
England, in 1800. He was well received, as
, was natural, in
government circles, and soon started work as a tory freelance.
His first venture, The Porcupine, failed; but his second, Cobbett's
Political Register, a weekly newspaper with long leaders, which
he began in 1802, gained the public ear. At first tory, then inde-
pendent, at last strongly radical, he maintained, till his death, an
influence of which no persecution and no folly could deprive him.
He appealed to the farmer and small trader as no one else could.
The composition of his weekly Register was not his only occu-
pation. Besides other publishing ventures, including Parlia-
mentary Debates, later undertaken by Hansard, and State Trials,
he combined business and enthusiastic pleasure as a model farmer.
All went well until, in 1810, he received a sentence of two
years' imprisonment on account of an invective against military
flogging. He could keep up writing his Register ; but his farm
went to wrack, and he came out heavily in debt. Still, however,
his hold on the public increased, and, when, in 1816, he succeeded
in reducing the price to twopence, the circulation of his paper
rose to over 40,000 copies. A temporary retreat to America did
little to impair the extent of his audience, and, all through the
reign of George IV, he was a leader of political opinion. Books
from his pen, egotistic in character, on farming, on politics, on the
4
2 L, XI.
CH. II.
## p. 50 (#72) ##############################################
50
[CH.
Political Writers and Speakers
conduct of life by the young, appeared one after another, had
their temporary use and still provide specimens of his character
and his literary style. By 1830, his fortunes were reestablished ;
the Reform act opened the doors of parliament to him, and he sat
in the Commons till his death in 1835.
Personal ambition and public spirit had nearly equal shares
in the indomitable Cobbett. Enormously and incorrigibly vain,
pragmatic, busy, bustling, bold,' he loved to be, or to think
himself, the centre of the stage, to lay down the law on every-
thing, to direct, praise or censure everybody, to point out how
things ought to be done, and, best of all, to spar furiously with
those who held opposite opinions. General principles were be-
yond the limit of his faculties; hence, he completely veered
round in bis politics with hardly a suspicion of the fact.
His
explanations of the state of things that he saw round him were
hasty guesses, rapidly matured into unreasoning prejudices. It
was all due to the funded debt and paper money, aggravated by
progressive depopulation (in 1820 ! )! , tithes and the tardy adoption
of his improvements in farming. Yet, he was a shrewd and
accurate observer, and an expert and fair judge of the state
of agriculture and the condition of tillers of the soil. True,
he had much good sense and critical faculty to apply to other
political matters; but, regarding the land, he was always at his
best. Peasant-bred, with a passion for farming, and a most
genuine, if quite unpoetic, love of the open country and all that
it could offer eye or ear, he depicted, with Dutch honesty, the
rural England that he knew how to see, its fertility and beauty,
the misery that had descended on many of its inhabitants, the
decent prosperity remaining to others. And he was master of
a style in which to express his knowledge. It is not one of those
great styles which embalm their authors' memory; but it was
serviceable. He is vigorous, plain and absolutely unaffected. The
aptest words come to him with most perfect ease. His eloquence
springs from vivid insight into the heart of his theme, and from
a native fervour and energy that do not need art to blow them
into flame. Apart from his plebeian virulence, he shows a natural
good taste in writing. The flaccid elegance and pompous rotund
verbiage then in vogue are, by him, left on one side. If he cannot
frame a period, every sentence has its work to do, and every
i Cobbett's determination, in spite of the census returns, to consider the population
as decreasing, is a remarkable instance of the strength of his prejudices. It is true that
he acknowledged the growth of the great towns.
a
## p. 51 (#73) ##############################################
11]
Orators
51
sentence tells. What mars his farmer's Odyssey, Rural Rides, is,
perhaps, the excess of this very disregard for fine writing. They
are notes of what he saw, and notes must often be brief, formless
and disconnected. Imagination and the charm it gives are, indeed,
absent throughout; but his sympathetic realism has an attraction
of its own. He scans the look and manners of the labourers;
he calculates whether they have bacon to eat; he descants on the
capabilities of the soil; and he is able to impress upon his
readers the strength of his interest in these things and of his
enjoyment of field and woods and streams and the palatable
salmon that inhabit the latter. He seems to give an unconscious
demonstration how excellent a tongue English could be for a man,
who saw and felt keenly, to express the facts as he saw them, and
the emotions which possessed him.
The forms of political literature which have been described-
verse and prosè, solemn treatise, pamphlet or weekly essay--all
possess one advantage over oratory. We can judge of their
effectiveness from themselves, as well as from what we are told
about them. Something we may miss in atmosphere which the
contemporary reader enjoyed; but, in all things else, we are
under the same conditions as his. In oratory, however, the case
is different. We have to piece together scattered reminiscences
of those who heard the speaker, and to imagine, as well as we
can, the effective delivery, the charm of voice and gesture, and,
still more, the momentary appropriateness of argument, phrase
and manner which gave life and force to what is now dead or semi-
animate matter. It is hardly possible, in fact, to do justice, long
after, in cold blood, to debating points, for, unlike the hearers,
unlike the speaker himself, we are not strung up, waiting for the
retort to an argument or invective.
