He looks up to the
distinctions of rank and station as he does to those of learning, with
the gross and overweening adulation of his early origin.
distinctions of rank and station as he does to those of learning, with
the gross and overweening adulation of his early origin.
Hazlitt - The Spirit of the Age; Or, Contemporary Portraits
" Up to the point where the earth or any
given country is fully occupied or cultivated, the means of subsistence
naturally increase in a geometrical ratio, and will more than keep pace
with the natural and unrestrained progress of population; and beyond
that point, they do not go on increasing even in Mr. Malthus's
arithmetical ratio, but are stationary or nearly so. So far, then, is
this proportion from being universally and mathematically true, that
in no part of the world or state of society does it hold good. But our
theorist, by laying down this double ratio as a law of nature, gains
this advantage, that at all times it seems as if, whether in new or
old-peopled countries, in fertile or barren soils, the population was
pressing hard on the means of subsistence; and again, it seems as if the
evil increased with the progress of improvement and civilization; for if
you cast your eye at the scale which is supposed to be calculated upon
true and infallible _data_, you find that when the population is at
8, the means of subsistence are at 4; so that here there is only a
_deficit_ of one half; but when it is at 32, they have only got to 6, so
that here there is a difference of 26 in 32, and so on in proportion;
the farther we proceed, the more enormous is the mass of vice and
misery we must undergo, as a consequence of the natural excess of the
population over the means of subsistence and as a salutary check to its
farther desolating progress. The mathematical Table, placed at the front
of the Essay, therefore leads to a secret suspicion or a bare-faced
assumption, that we ought in mere kindness and compassion to give every
sort of indirect and under-hand encouragement (to say the least) to the
providential checks of vice and misery; as the sooner we arrest this
formidable and paramount evil in its course, the less opportunity we
leave it of doing incalculable mischief. Accordingly, whenever there is
the least talk of colonizing new countries, of extending the population,
or adding to social comforts and improvements, Mr. Malthus conjures up
his double ratios, and insists on the alarming results of advancing
them a single step forward in the series. By the same rule, it would
be better to return at once to a state of barbarism; and to take the
benefit of acorns and scuttle-fish, as a security against the luxuries
and wants of civilized life. But it is not our ingenious author's wish
to hint at or recommend any alterations in existing institutions; and he
is therefore silent on that unpalatable part of the subject and natural
inference from his principles.
Mr. Malthus's "gospel is preached to the poor. " He lectures them on
economy, on morality, the regulation of their passions (which, he says,
at other times, are amenable to no restraint) and on the ungracious
topic, that "the laws of nature, which are the laws of God, have doomed
them and their families to starve for want of a right to the smallest
portion of food beyond what their labour will supply, or some charitable
hand may hold out in compassion. " This is illiberal, and it is not
philosophical. The laws of nature or of God, to which the author
appeals, are no other than a limited fertility and a limited earth.
Within those bounds, the rest is regulated by the laws of man. The
division of the produce of the soil, the price of labour, the relief
afforded to the poor, are matters of human arrangement: while any
charitable hand can extend relief, it is a proof that the means of
subsistence are not exhausted in themselves, that "the tables are not
full! " Mr. Malthus says that the laws of nature, which are the laws of
God, have rendered that relief physically impossible; and yet he would
abrogate the poor-laws by an act of the legislature, in order to take
away that _impossible_ relief, which the laws of God deny, and which the
laws of man _actually_ afford. We cannot think that this view of his
subject, which is prominent and dwelt on at great length and with much
pertinacity, is dictated either by rigid logic or melting charity! A
labouring man is not allowed to knock down a hare or a partridge that
spoils his garden: a country-squire keeps a pack of hounds: a lady of
quality rides out with a footman behind her, on two sleek, well-fed
horses. We have not a word to say against all this as exemplifying the
spirit of the English Constitution, as a part of the law of the land, or
as an artful distribution of light and shade in the social picture; but
if any one insists at the same time that "the laws of nature, which are
the laws of God, have doomed the poor and their families to starve,"
because the principle of population has encroached upon and swallowed up
the means of subsistence, so that not a mouthful of food is left _by the
grinding law of necessity_ for the poor, we beg leave to deny both fact
and inference--and we put it to Mr. Malthus whether we are not, in
strictness, justified in doing so?
We have, perhaps, said enough to explain our feeling on the subject of
Mr. Malthus's merits and defects. We think he had the opportunity and
the means in his hands of producing a great work on the principle of
population; but we believe he has let it slip from his having an eye to
other things besides that broad and unexplored question. He wished not
merely to advance to the discovery of certain great and valuable truths,
but at the same time to overthrow certain unfashionable paradoxes by
exaggerated statements--to curry favour with existing prejudices and
interests by garbled representations. He has, in a word, as it appears
to us on a candid retrospect and without any feelings of controversial
asperity rankling in our minds, sunk the philosopher and the friend of
his species (a character to which he might have aspired) in the sophist
and party-writer. The period at which Mr. Malthus came forward teemed
with answers to Modern Philosophy, with antidotes to liberty and
humanity, with abusive Histories of the Greek and Roman republics, with
fulsome panegyrics on the Roman Emperors (at the very time when we were
reviling Buonaparte for his strides to universal empire) with the slime
and offal of desperate servility--and we cannot but consider the
Essay as one of the poisonous ingredients thrown into the cauldron of
Legitimacy "to make it thick and slab. " Our author has, indeed, so
far done service to the cause of truth, that he has counteracted
many capital errors formerly prevailing as to the universal and
indiscriminate encouragement of population under all circumstances; but
he has countenanced opposite errors, which if adopted in theory and
practice would be even more mischievous, and has left it to future
philosophers to follow up the principle, that some check must be
provided for the unrestrained progress of population, into a set of
wiser and more humane consequences. Mr. Godwin has lately attempted an
answer to the Essay (thus giving Mr. Malthus a _Roland for his Oliver_)
but we think he has judged ill in endeavouring to invalidate the
principle, instead of confining himself to point out the misapplication
of it. There is one argument introduced in this Reply, which will,
perhaps, amuse the reader as a sort of metaphysical puzzle.
"It has sometimes occurred to me whether Mr. Malthus did not catch the
first hint of his geometrical ratio from a curious passage of Judge
Blackstone, on consanguinity, which is as follows:--
"The doctrine of lineal consanguinity is sufficiently plain and obvious;
but it is at the first view astonishing to consider the number of lineal
ancestors which every man has within no very great number of degrees:
and so many different bloods is a man said to contain in his veins, as
he hath lineal ancestors. Of these he hath two in the first ascending
degree, his own parents; he hath four in the second, the parents of his
father and the parents of his mother; he hath eight in the third, the
parents of his two grandfathers and two grandmothers; and by the same
rule of progression, he hath an hundred and twenty-eight in the seventh;
a thousand and twenty-four in the tenth; and at the twentieth degree, or
the distance of twenty generations, every man hath above a million of
ancestors, as common arithmetic will demonstrate.
"This will seem surprising to those who are unacquainted with the
increasing power of progressive numbers; but is palpably evident from
the following table of a geometrical progression, in which the first
term is 2, and the denominator also 2; or, to speak more intelligibly,
it is evident, for that each of us has two ancestors in the first
degree; the number of which is doubled at every remove, because each of
our ancestors had also two ancestors of his own.
_Lineal Degrees. _ _Number of Ancestors_.
1 . . . . . . 2
2 . . . . . . 4
3 . . . . . . 8
4 . . . . . . 16
5 . . . . . . 32
6 . . . . . . 64
7 . . . . . . 128
8 . . . . . . 256
9 . . . . . . 512
10 . . . . . . 1024
11 . . . . . . 2048
12 . . . . . . 4096
13 . . . . . . 8192
14 . . . . . . 16,384
15 . . . . . . 32,768
16 . . . . . . 65,536
17 . . . . . . 131,072
18 . . . . . . 262,144
19 . . . . . . 524,288
20 . . . . . . 1,048,576
"This argument, however," (proceeds Mr. Godwin) "from Judge Blackstone
of a geometrical progression would much more naturally apply to
Montesquieu's hypothesis of the depopulation of the world, and prove
that the human species is hastening fast to extinction, than to the
purpose for which Mr. Malthus has employed it. An ingenious sophism
might be raised upon it, to shew that the race of mankind will
ultimately terminate in unity. Mr. Malthus, indeed, should have
reflected, that it is much more certain that every man has had ancestors
than that he will have posterity, and that it is still more doubtful,
whether he will have posterity to twenty or to an indefinite number of
generations. "--ENQUIRY CONCERNING POPULATION, p. 100.
Mr. Malthus's style is correct and elegant; his tone of controversy mild
and gentlemanly; and the care with which he has brought his facts and
documents together, deserves the highest praise. He has lately quitted
his favourite subject of population, and broke a lance with Mr. Ricardo
on the question of rent and value. The partisans of Mr. Ricardo, who are
also the admirers of Mr. Malthus, say that the usual sagacity of the
latter has here failed him, and that he has shewn himself to be a very
illogical writer. To have said this of him formerly on another ground,
was accounted a heresy and a piece of presumption not easily to be
forgiven. Indeed Mr. Malthus has always been a sort of "darling in the
public eye," whom it was unsafe to meddle with. He has contrived to
make himself as many friends by his attacks on the schemes of _Human
Perfectibility_ and on the _Poor-Laws_, as Mandeville formerly procured
enemies by his attacks on _Human Perfections_ and on _Charity-Schools_;
and among other instances that we might mention, _Plug_ Pulteney, the
celebrated miser, of whom Mr. Burke said on his having a large
estate left him, "that now it was to be hoped he would _set up a
pocket-handkerchief_," was so enamoured with the saving schemes and
humane economy of the Essay, that he desired a friend to find out the
author and offer him a church living! This liberal intention was (by
design or accident) unhappily frustrated.
* * * * *
MR. GIFFORD.
Mr. Gifford was originally bred to some handicraft: he afterwards
contrived to learn Latin, and was for some time an usher in a school,
till he became a tutor in a nobleman's family. The low-bred, self-taught
man, the pedant, and the dependant on the great contribute to form the
Editor of the _Quarterly Review_. He is admirably qualified for this
situation, which he has held for some years, by a happy combination of
defects, natural and acquired; and in the event of his death, it will be
difficult to provide him a suitable successor.
Mr. Gifford has no pretensions to be thought a man of genius, of taste,
or even of general knowledge. He merely understands the mechanical and
instrumental part of learning. He is a critic of the last age, when
the different editions of an author, or the dates of his several
performances were all that occupied the inquiries of a profound scholar,
and the spirit of the writer or the beauties of his style were left to
shift for themselves, or exercise the fancy of the light and superficial
reader. In studying an old author, he has no notion of any thing beyond
adjusting a point, proposing a different reading, or correcting, by the
collation of various copies, an error of the press. In appreciating a
modern one, if it is an enemy, the first thing he thinks of is to charge
him with bad grammar--he scans his sentences instead of weighing his
sense; or if it is a friend, the highest compliment he conceives it
possible to pay him is, that his thoughts and expressions are moulded
on some hackneyed model. His standard of _ideal_ perfection is what he
himself now is, a person of _mediocre_ literary attainments: his utmost
contempt is shewn by reducing any one to what he himself once was, a
person without the ordinary advantages of education and learning. It is
accordingly assumed, with much complacency in his critical pages, that
Tory writers are classical and courtly as a matter of course; as it is
a standing jest and evident truism, that Whigs and Reformers must be
persons of low birth and breeding--imputations from one of which he
himself has narrowly escaped, and both of which he holds in suitable
abhorrence. He stands over a contemporary performance with all the
self-conceit and self-importance of a country schoolmaster, tries it by
technical rules, affects not to understand the meaning, examines the
hand-writing, the spelling, shrugs up his shoulders and chuckles over a
slip of the pen, and keeps a sharp look-out for a false concord and--a
flogging. There is nothing liberal, nothing humane in his style of
judging: it is altogether petty, captious, and literal. The Editor's
political subserviency adds the last finishing to his ridiculous
pedantry and vanity. He has all his life been a follower in the train
of wealth and power--strives to back his pretensions on Parnassus by a
place at court, and to gild his reputation as a man of letters by the
smile of greatness. He thinks his works are stamped with additional
value by having his name in the _Red-Book_.
He looks up to the
distinctions of rank and station as he does to those of learning, with
the gross and overweening adulation of his early origin. All his notions
are low, upstart, servile. He thinks it the highest honour to a poet to
be patronised by a peer or by some dowager of quality. He is prouder
of a court-livery than of a laurel-wreath; and is only sure of having
established his claims to respectability by having sacrificed those of
independence. He is a retainer to the Muses; a door-keeper to learning;
a lacquey in the state. He believes that modern literature should wear
the fetters of classical antiquity; that truth is to be weighed in the
scales of opinion and prejudice; that power is equivalent to right; that
genius is dependent on rules; that taste and refinement of language
consist in _word-catching_. Many persons suppose that Mr. Gifford knows
better than he pretends; and that he is shrewd, artful, and designing.
But perhaps it may be nearer the mark to suppose that his dulness is
guarantee for his sincerity; or that before he is the tool of the
profligacy of others, he is the dupe of his own jaundiced feelings, and
narrow, hoodwinked perceptions.
"Destroy his fib or sophistry: in vain--
The creature's at his dirty work again! "
But this is less from choice or perversity, than because he cannot help
it and can do nothing else. He damns a beautiful expression less out
of spite than because he really does not understand it: any novelty of
thought or sentiment gives him a shock from which he cannot recover
for some time, and he naturally takes his revenge for the alarm and
uneasiness occasioned him, without referring to venal or party motives.
He garbles an author's meaning, not so much wilfully, as because it is a
pain to him to enlarge his microscopic view to take in the context, when
a particular sentence or passage has struck him as quaint and out of the
way: he fly-blows an author's style, and picks out detached words and
phrases for cynical reprobation, simply because he feels himself at
home, or takes a pride and pleasure in this sort of petty warfare. He is
tetchy and impatient of contradiction; sore with wounded pride; angry
at obvious faults, more angry at unforeseen beauties. He has the
_chalk-stones_ in his understanding, and from being used to long
confinement, cannot bear the slightest jostling or irregularity of
motion. He may call out with the fellow in the _Tempest_--"I am not
Stephano, but a cramp! " He would go back to the standard of opinions,
style, the faded ornaments, and insipid formalities that came into
fashion about forty years ago. Flashes of thought, flights of fancy,
idiomatic expressions, he sets down among the signs of the times--the
extraordinary occurrences of the age we live in. They are marks of a
restless and revolutionary spirit: they disturb his composure of mind,
and threaten (by implication) the safety of the state. His slow,
snail-paced, bed-rid habits of reasoning cannot keep up with the
whirling, eccentric motion, the rapid, perhaps extravagant combinations
of modern literature. He has long been stationary himself, and is
determined that others shall remain so. The hazarding a paradox is like
letting off a pistol close to his ear: he is alarmed and offended. The
using an elliptical mode of expression (such as he did not use to find
in Guides to the English Tongue) jars him like coming suddenly to a
step in a flight of stairs that you were not aware of. He _pishes_ and
_pshaws_ at all this, exercises a sort of interjectional criticism on
what excites his spleen, his envy, or his wonder, and hurls his meagre
anathemas _ex cathedrâ_ at all those writers who are indifferent alike
to his precepts and his example!
Mr. Gifford, in short, is possessed of that sort of learning which is
likely to result from an over-anxious desire to supply the want of the
first rudiments of education; that sort of wit, which is the offspring
of ill-humour or bodily pain; that sort of sense, which arises from a
spirit of contradiction and a disposition to cavil at and dispute
the opinions of others; and that sort of reputation, which is the
consequence of bowing to established authority and ministerial
influence. He dedicates to some great man, and receives his compliments
in return. He appeals to some great name, and the Under-graduates of the
two Universities look up to him as an oracle of wisdom. He throws the
weight of his verbal criticism and puny discoveries in _black-letter_
reading into the gap, that is supposed to be making in the Constitution
by Whigs and Radicals, whom he qualifies without mercy as dunces and
miscreants; and so entitles himself to the protection of Church and
State. The character of his mind is an utter want of independence and
magnanimity in all that he attempts. He cannot go alone, he must have
crutches, a go-cart and trammels, or he is timid, fretful, and helpless
as a child. He cannot conceive of any thing different from what he finds
it, and hates those who pretend to a greater reach of intellect
or boldness of spirit than himself. He inclines, by a natural and
deliberate bias, to the traditional in laws and government; to
the orthodox in religion; to the safe in opinion; to the trite in
imagination; to the technical in style; to whatever implies a surrender
of individual judgment into the hands of authority, and a subjection of
individual feeling to mechanic rules. If he finds any one flying in the
face of these, or straggling from the beaten path, he thinks he has them
at a notable disadvantage, and falls foul of them without loss of time,
partly to soothe his own sense of mortified self-consequence, and as an
edifying spectacle to his legitimate friends. He takes none but unfair
advantages. He _twits_ his adversaries (that is, those who are not
in the leading-strings of his school or party) with some personal or
accidental defect. If a writer has been punished for a political libel,
he is sure to hear of it in a literary criticism. If a lady goes on
crutches and is out of favour at court, she is reminded of it in Mr.
Gilford's manly satire. He sneers at people of low birth or who have
not had a college-education, partly to hide his own want of certain
advantages, partly as well-timed flattery to those who possess them. He
has a right to laugh at poor, unfriended, untitled genius from wearing
the livery of rank and letters, as footmen behind a coronet-coach laugh
at the rabble. He keeps good company, and forgets himself. He stands at
the door of Mr. Murray's shop, and will not let any body pass but the
well-dressed mob, or some followers of the court. To edge into the
_Quarterly_ Temple of Fame the candidate must have a diploma from the
Universities, a passport from the Treasury. Otherwise, it is a breach of
etiquette to let him pass, an insult to the better sort who aspire to
the love of letters--and may chance to drop in to the _Feast of the
Poets_. Or, if he cannot manage it thus, or get rid of the claim on the
bare ground of poverty or want of school-learning, he _trumps_ up an
excuse for the occasion, such as that "a man was confined in Newgate a
short time before"--it is not a _lie_ on the part of the critic, it is
only an amiable subserviency to the will of his betters, like that of
a menial who is ordered to deny his master, a sense of propriety, a
knowledge of the world, a poetical and moral license. Such fellows
(such is his cue from his employers) should at any rate be kept out of
privileged places: persons who have been convicted of prose-libels ought
not to be suffered to write poetry--if the fact was not exactly as it
was stated, it was something of the kind, or it _ought_ to have been
so, the assertion was a pious fraud,--the public, the court, the prince
himself might read the work, but for this mark of opprobrium set upon
it--it was not to be endured that an insolent plebeian should aspire to
elegance, taste, fancy--it was throwing down the barriers which ought
to separate the higher and the lower classes, the loyal and the
disloyal--the paraphrase of the story of Dante was therefore to perform
quarantine, it was to seem not yet recovered from the gaol infection,
there was to be a taint upon it, as there was none in it--and all this
was performed by a single slip of Mr. Gifford's pen! We would willingly
believe (if we could) that in this case there was as much weakness and
prejudice as there was malice and cunning. --Again, we do not think it
possible that under any circumstances the writer of the _Verses to Anna_
could enter into the spirit or delicacy of Mr. Keats's poetry. The fate
of the latter somewhat resembled that of
--"a bud bit by an envious worm,
Ere it could spread its sweet leaves to the air,
Or dedicate its beauty to the sun. "
Mr. Keats's ostensible crime was that he had been praised in the
_Examiner Newspaper_: a greater and more unpardonable offence probably
was, that he was a true poet, with all the errors and beauties of
youthful genius to answer for. Mr. Gifford was as insensible to the one
as he was inexorable to the other. Let the reader judge from the two
subjoined specimens how far the one writer could ever, without a
presumption equalled only by a want of self-knowledge, set himself in
judgment on the other.
"Out went the taper as she hurried in;
Its little smoke in pallid moonshine died:
She closed the door, she panted, all akin
To spirits of the air and visions wide:
No utter'd syllable, or woe betide!
But to her heart, her heart was voluble,
Paining with eloquence her balmy side;
As though a tongueless nightingale should swell
Her heart in vain, and die, heart-stifled, in her dell.
"A casement high and triple-arch'd there was,
All garlanded with carven imag'ries
Of fruits, and flowers, and bunches of knot-grass,
And diamonded with panes of quaint device,
Innumerable of stains and splendid dyes,
As are the tiger-moth's deep-damask'd wings;
And in the midst, 'mong thousand heraldries,
And twilight saints and dim emblazonings,
A shielded scutcheon blush'd with blood of queens and kings.
"Full on this casement shone the wintry moon,
And threw warm gules on Madeline's fair breast,
As down she knelt for Heaven's grace and boon;
Rose-bloom fell on her hands, together prest,
And on her silver cross soft amethyst,
And on her hair a glory, like a Saint:
She seem'd a splendid angel, newly drest,
Save wings, for heaven:--Porphyro grew faint:
She knelt, so pure a thing, so free from mortal taint.
"Anon his heart revives: her vespers done,
Of all its wreathed pearls her hair she frees;
Unclasps her warmed jewels one by one;
Loosens her fragrant boddice; by degrees
Her rich attire creeps rustling to her knees:
Half-hidden, like a mermaid in sea-weed,
Pensive awhile she dreams awake, and sees,
In fancy, fair St. Agnes in her bed,
But dares not look behind, or all the charm is fled.
"Soon trembling in her soft and chilly nest,
In sort of wakeful swoon, perplex'd she lay,
Until the poppied warmth of sleep oppress'd
Her soothed limbs, and soul fatigued away
Flown, like a thought, until the morrow-day:
Blissfully haven'd both from joy and pain;
Clasp'd like a missal where swart Paynims pray;
Blinded alike from sunshine and from rain,
As though a rose should shut, and be a bud again. "
EVE OF ST. AGNES.
With the rich beauties and the dim obscurities of lines like these, let
us contrast the Verses addressed _To a Tuft of early Violets_ by the
fastidious author of the Baviad and Mæviad. --
"Sweet flowers! that from your humble beds
Thus prematurely dare to rise,
And trust your unprotected heads
To cold Aquarius' watery skies.
"Retire, retire! _These_ tepid airs
Are not the genial brood of May;
_That_ sun with light malignant glares,
And flatters only to betray.
"Stern Winter's reign is not yet past--
Lo! while your buds prepare to blow,
On icy pinions comes the blast,
And nips your root, and lays you low.
"Alas, for such ungentle doom!
But I will shield you; and supply
A kindlier soil on which to bloom,
A nobler bed on which to die.
"Come then--'ere yet the morning ray
Has drunk the dew that gems your crest,
And drawn your balmiest sweets away;
O come and grace my Anna's breast.
"Ye droop, fond flowers! But did ye know
What worth, what goodness there reside,
Your cups with liveliest tints would glow;
And spread their leaves with conscious pride.
"For there has liberal Nature joined
Her riches to the stores of Art,
And added to the vigorous mind
The soft, the sympathising heart.
"Come, then--'ere yet the morning ray
Has drunk the dew that gems your crest,
And drawn your balmiest sweets away;
O come and grace my Anna's breast.
"O! I should think--_that fragrant bed_
_Might I but hope with you to share_--[A]
Years of anxiety repaid
By one short hour of transport there.
"More blest than me, thus shall ye live
Your little day; and when ye die,
Sweet flowers! the grateful Muse shall give
A verse; the sorrowing maid, a sigh.
"While I alas! no distant date,
Mix with the dust from whence I came,
Without a friend to weep my fate,
Without a stone to tell my name. "
We subjoin one more specimen of these "wild strains"[B] said to be
"_Written two years after the preceding_. " ECCE ITERUM CRISPINUS.
"I wish I was where Anna lies;
For I am sick of lingering here,
And every hour Affection cries,
Go, and partake her humble bier.
"I wish I could! for when she died
I lost my all; and life has prov'd
Since that sad hour a dreary void,
A waste unlovely and unlov'd.
"But who, when I am turn'd to clay,
Shall duly to her grave repair,
And pluck the ragged moss away,
And weeds that have "no business there? "
"And who, with pious hand, shall bring
The flowers she cherish'd, snow-drops cold,
And violets that unheeded spring,
To scatter o'er her hallow'd mould?
"And who, while Memory loves to dwell
Upon her name for ever dear,
Shall feel his heart with passion swell,
And pour the bitter, bitter tear?
"I did it; and would fate allow,
Should visit still, should still deplore--
But health and strength have left me now,
But I, alas! can weep no more.
"Take then, sweet maid! this simple strain,
The last I offer at thy shrine;
Thy grave must then undeck'd remain,
And all thy memory fade with mine.
"And can thy soft persuasive look,
That voice that might with music vie,
Thy air that every gazer took,
Thy matchless eloquence of eye,
"Thy spirits, frolicsome as good,
Thy courage, by no ills dismay'd,
Thy patience, by no wrongs subdued,
Thy gay good-humour--can they "fade? "
"Perhaps--but sorrow dims my eye:
Cold turf, which I no more must view,
Dear name, which I no more must sigh,
A long, a last, a sad adieu! "
It may be said in extenuation of the low, mechanic vein of these
impoverished lines, that they were written at an early age--they were
the inspired production of a youthful lover! Mr. Gifford was thirty when
he wrote them, Mr. Keats died when he was scarce twenty! Farther it may
be said, that Mr. Gifford hazarded his first poetical attempts under all
the disadvantages of a neglected education: but the same circumstance,
together with a few unpruned redundancies of fancy and quaintnesses of
expression, was made the plea on which Mr. Keats was hooted out of the
world, and his fine talents and wounded sensibilities consigned to an
early grave. In short, the treatment of this heedless candidate for
poetical fame might serve as a warning, and was intended to serve as a
warning to all unfledged tyros, how they venture upon any such doubtful
experiments, except under the auspices of some lord of the bedchamber or
Government Aristarchus, and how they imprudently associate themselves
with men of mere popular talent or independence of feeling! --It is the
same in prose works. The Editor scorns to enter the lists of argument
with any proscribed writer of the opposite party. He does not refute,
but denounces him. He makes no concessions to an adversary, lest they
should in some way be turned against him. He only feels himself safe in
the fancied insignificance of others: he only feels himself superior
to those whom he stigmatizes as the lowest of mankind. All persons are
without common-sense and honesty who do not believe implicitly (with
him) in the immaculateness of Ministers and the divine origin of Kings.
Thus he informed the world that the author of TABLE-TALK was a person
who could not write a sentence of common English and could hardly spell
his own name, because he was not a friend to the restoration of the
Bourbons, and had the assurance to write _Characters of Shakespears
Plays_ in a style of criticism somewhat different from Mr. Gifford's. He
charged this writer with imposing on the public by a flowery style; and
when the latter ventured to refer to a work of his, called _An Essay on
the Principles of Human Action_, which has not a single ornament in it,
as a specimen of his original studies and the proper bias of his mind,
the learned critic, with a shrug of great self-satisfaction, said, "It
was amusing to see this person, sitting like one of Brouwer's Dutch
boors over his gin and tobacco-pipes, and fancying himself a Leibnitz! "
The question was, whether the subject of Mr. Gifford's censure had ever
written such a work or not; for if he had, he had amused himself with
something besides gin and tobacco-pipes. But our Editor, by virtue
of the situation he holds, is superior to facts or arguments: he is
accountable neither to the public nor to authors for what he says of
them, but owes it to his employers to prejudice the work and vilify the
writer, if the latter is not avowedly ready to range himself on the
stronger side. --The _Quarterly Review_, besides the political _tirades_
and denunciations of suspected writers, intended for the guidance of the
heads of families, is filled up with accounts of books of Voyages
and Travels for the amusement of the younger branches. The poetical
department is almost a sinecure, consisting of mere summary decisions
and a list of quotations. Mr. Croker is understood to contribute the
St. Helena articles and the liberality, Mr. Canning the practical good
sense, Mr. D'Israeli the good-nature, Mr. Jacob the modesty, Mr. Southey
the consistency, and the Editor himself the chivalrous spirit and the
attacks on Lady Morgan. It is a double crime, and excites a double
portion of spleen in the Editor, when female writers are not advocates
of passive obedience and non-resistance. This Journal, then, is a
depository for every species of political sophistry and personal
calumny. There is no abuse or corruption that does not there find a
jesuitical palliation or a bare-faced vindication. There we meet the
slime of hypocrisy, the varnish of courts, the cant of pedantry, the
cobwebs of the law, the iron hand of power. Its object is as mischievous
as the means by which it is pursued are odious. The intention is to
poison the sources of public opinion and of individual fame--to pervert
literature, from being the natural ally of freedom and humanity, into an
engine of priestcraft and despotism, and to undermine the spirit of the
English Constitution and the independence of the English character.
The Editor and his friends systematically explode every principle of
liberty, laugh patriotism and public spirit to scorn, resent every
pretence to integrity as a piece of singularity or insolence, and strike
at the root of all free inquiry or discussion, by running down every
writer as a vile scribbler and a bad member of society, who is not
a hireling and a slave. No means are stuck at in accomplishing this
laudable end. Strong in patronage, they trample on truth, justice, and
decency. They claim the privilege of court-favourites. They keep as
little faith with the public, as with their opponents. No statement in
the _Quarterly Review_ is to be trusted: there is no fact that is not
misrepresented in it, no quotation that is not garbled, no character
that is not slandered, if it can answer the purposes of a party to do
so. The weight of power, of wealth, of rank is thrown into the scale,
gives its impulse to the machine; and the whole is under the guidance of
Mr. Gifford's instinctive genius--of the inborn hatred of servility for
independence, of dulness for talent, of cunning and impudence for truth
and honesty. It costs him no effort to execute his disreputable task--in
being the tool of a crooked policy, he but labours in his natural
vocation. He patches up a rotten system as he would supply the chasms in
a worm-eaten manuscript, from a grovelling incapacity to do any thing
better; thinks that if a single iota in the claims of prerogative and
power were lost, the whole fabric of society would fall upon his
head and crush him; and calculates that his best chance for literary
reputation is by _black-balling_ one half of the competitors as
Jacobins and levellers, and securing the suffrages of the other half in
his favour as a loyal subject and trusty partisan!
Mr. Gifford, as a satirist, is violent and abrupt. He takes obvious or
physical defects, and dwells upon them with much labour and harshness of
invective, but with very little wit or spirit. He expresses a great deal
of anger and contempt, but you cannot tell very well why--except that he
seems to be sore and out of humour. His satire is mere peevishness and
spleen, or something worse--personal antipathy and rancour. We are in
quite as much pain for the writer, as for the object of his resentment.
His address to Peter Pindar is laughable from its outrageousness. He
denounces him as a wretch hateful to God and man, for some of the most
harmless and amusing trifles that ever were written--and the very good-
humour and pleasantry of which, we suspect, constituted their offence in
the eyes of this Drawcansir. --His attacks on Mrs. Robinson were unmanly,
and even those on Mr. Merry and the Della-Cruscan School were much
more ferocious than the occasion warranted. A little affectation and
quaintness of style did not merit such severity of castigation. [C] As a
translator, Mr. Gifford's version of the Roman satirist is the baldest,
and, in parts, the most offensive of all others. We do not know why
he attempted it, unless he had got it in his head that he should thus
follow in the steps of Dryden, as he had already done in those of Pope
in the Baviad and Maeviad. As an editor of old authors, Mr. Gifford is
entitled to considerable praise for the pains he has taken in revising
the text, and for some improvements he has introduced into it. He had
better have spared the notes, in which, though he has detected the
blunders of previous commentators, he has exposed his own ill-temper and
narrowness of feeling more. As a critic, he has thrown no light on the
character and spirit of his authors. He has shewn no striking power of
analysis nor of original illustration, though he has chosen to exercise
his pen on writers most congenial to his own turn of mind, from their
dry and caustic vein; Massinger, and Ben Jonson. What he will make of
Marlowe, it is difficult to guess. He has none of "the fiery quality"
of the poet. Mr. Gifford does not take for his motto on these
occasions--_Spiritus precipitandus est! _--His most successful efforts in
this way are barely respectable. In general, his observations are petty,
ill-concocted, and discover as little _tact_, as they do a habit of
connected reasoning. Thus, for instance, in attempting to add the name
of Massinger to the list of Catholic poets, our minute critic insists
on the profusion of crucifixes, glories, angelic visions, garlands of
roses, and clouds of incense scattered through the _Virgin-Martyr,_ as
evidence of the theological sentiments meant to be inculcated by the
play, when the least reflection might have taught him, that they proved
nothing but the author's poetical conception of the character and
_costume_ of his subject. A writer might, with the same sinister,
short-sighted shrewdness, be accused of Heathenism for talking of Flora
and Ceres in a poem on the Seasons! What are produced as the exclusive
badges and occult proofs of Catholic bigotry, are nothing but the
adventitious ornaments and external symbols, the gross and sensible
language, in a word, the _poetry_ of Christianity in general. What
indeed shews the frivolousness of the whole inference is that Deckar,
who is asserted by our critic to have contributed some of the most
passionate and fantastic of these devotional scenes, is not even
suspected of a leaning to Popery. In like manner, he excuses Massinger
for the grossness of one of his plots (that of the _Unnatural Combat_)
by saying that it was supposed to take place before the Christian era;
by this shallow common-place persuading himself, or fancying he could
persuade others, that the crime in question (which yet on the very face
of the story is made the ground of a tragic catastrophe) was first made
_statutory_ by the Christian religion.
The foregoing is a harsh criticism, and may be thought illiberal. But as
Mr. Gifford assumes a right to say what he pleases of others--they may
be allowed to speak the truth of him!
[Footnote A: What an awkward bed-fellow for a tuft of violets! ]
[Footnote B:
"How oft, O Dart! what time the faithful pair
Walk'd forth, the fragrant hour of eve to share,
On thy romantic banks, have my _wild strains_
(Not yet forgot amidst my native plains)
While thou hast sweetly gurgled down the vale.
Filled up the pause of love's delightful tale!
While, ever as she read, the conscious maid,
By faultering voice and downcast looks betray'd,
Would blushing on her lover's neck recline,
And with her finger--point the tenderest line! "
_Mæviad_, pp. 194, 202.
Yet the author assures us just before, that in these "wild strains" "all
was plain. "
"Even then (admire, John Bell! my simple ways)
No heaven and hell danced madly through my lays,
No oaths, no execrations; _all was plain_;
Yet trust me, while thy ever jingling train
Chime their sonorous woes with frigid art,
And shock the reason and revolt the heart;
My hopes and fears, in nature's language drest,
Awakened love in many a gentle breast. "
_Ibid. _ v. 185-92.
If any one else had composed these "wild strains," in which "all is
plain," Mr. Gifford would have accused them of three things, "1.
Downright nonsense. 2. Downright frigidity. 3. Downright doggrel;" and
proceeded to anatomise them very cordially in his way. As it is, he is
thrilled with a very pleasing horror at his former scenes of tenderness,
and "gasps at the recollection" _of watery Aquarius_!
given country is fully occupied or cultivated, the means of subsistence
naturally increase in a geometrical ratio, and will more than keep pace
with the natural and unrestrained progress of population; and beyond
that point, they do not go on increasing even in Mr. Malthus's
arithmetical ratio, but are stationary or nearly so. So far, then, is
this proportion from being universally and mathematically true, that
in no part of the world or state of society does it hold good. But our
theorist, by laying down this double ratio as a law of nature, gains
this advantage, that at all times it seems as if, whether in new or
old-peopled countries, in fertile or barren soils, the population was
pressing hard on the means of subsistence; and again, it seems as if the
evil increased with the progress of improvement and civilization; for if
you cast your eye at the scale which is supposed to be calculated upon
true and infallible _data_, you find that when the population is at
8, the means of subsistence are at 4; so that here there is only a
_deficit_ of one half; but when it is at 32, they have only got to 6, so
that here there is a difference of 26 in 32, and so on in proportion;
the farther we proceed, the more enormous is the mass of vice and
misery we must undergo, as a consequence of the natural excess of the
population over the means of subsistence and as a salutary check to its
farther desolating progress. The mathematical Table, placed at the front
of the Essay, therefore leads to a secret suspicion or a bare-faced
assumption, that we ought in mere kindness and compassion to give every
sort of indirect and under-hand encouragement (to say the least) to the
providential checks of vice and misery; as the sooner we arrest this
formidable and paramount evil in its course, the less opportunity we
leave it of doing incalculable mischief. Accordingly, whenever there is
the least talk of colonizing new countries, of extending the population,
or adding to social comforts and improvements, Mr. Malthus conjures up
his double ratios, and insists on the alarming results of advancing
them a single step forward in the series. By the same rule, it would
be better to return at once to a state of barbarism; and to take the
benefit of acorns and scuttle-fish, as a security against the luxuries
and wants of civilized life. But it is not our ingenious author's wish
to hint at or recommend any alterations in existing institutions; and he
is therefore silent on that unpalatable part of the subject and natural
inference from his principles.
Mr. Malthus's "gospel is preached to the poor. " He lectures them on
economy, on morality, the regulation of their passions (which, he says,
at other times, are amenable to no restraint) and on the ungracious
topic, that "the laws of nature, which are the laws of God, have doomed
them and their families to starve for want of a right to the smallest
portion of food beyond what their labour will supply, or some charitable
hand may hold out in compassion. " This is illiberal, and it is not
philosophical. The laws of nature or of God, to which the author
appeals, are no other than a limited fertility and a limited earth.
Within those bounds, the rest is regulated by the laws of man. The
division of the produce of the soil, the price of labour, the relief
afforded to the poor, are matters of human arrangement: while any
charitable hand can extend relief, it is a proof that the means of
subsistence are not exhausted in themselves, that "the tables are not
full! " Mr. Malthus says that the laws of nature, which are the laws of
God, have rendered that relief physically impossible; and yet he would
abrogate the poor-laws by an act of the legislature, in order to take
away that _impossible_ relief, which the laws of God deny, and which the
laws of man _actually_ afford. We cannot think that this view of his
subject, which is prominent and dwelt on at great length and with much
pertinacity, is dictated either by rigid logic or melting charity! A
labouring man is not allowed to knock down a hare or a partridge that
spoils his garden: a country-squire keeps a pack of hounds: a lady of
quality rides out with a footman behind her, on two sleek, well-fed
horses. We have not a word to say against all this as exemplifying the
spirit of the English Constitution, as a part of the law of the land, or
as an artful distribution of light and shade in the social picture; but
if any one insists at the same time that "the laws of nature, which are
the laws of God, have doomed the poor and their families to starve,"
because the principle of population has encroached upon and swallowed up
the means of subsistence, so that not a mouthful of food is left _by the
grinding law of necessity_ for the poor, we beg leave to deny both fact
and inference--and we put it to Mr. Malthus whether we are not, in
strictness, justified in doing so?
We have, perhaps, said enough to explain our feeling on the subject of
Mr. Malthus's merits and defects. We think he had the opportunity and
the means in his hands of producing a great work on the principle of
population; but we believe he has let it slip from his having an eye to
other things besides that broad and unexplored question. He wished not
merely to advance to the discovery of certain great and valuable truths,
but at the same time to overthrow certain unfashionable paradoxes by
exaggerated statements--to curry favour with existing prejudices and
interests by garbled representations. He has, in a word, as it appears
to us on a candid retrospect and without any feelings of controversial
asperity rankling in our minds, sunk the philosopher and the friend of
his species (a character to which he might have aspired) in the sophist
and party-writer. The period at which Mr. Malthus came forward teemed
with answers to Modern Philosophy, with antidotes to liberty and
humanity, with abusive Histories of the Greek and Roman republics, with
fulsome panegyrics on the Roman Emperors (at the very time when we were
reviling Buonaparte for his strides to universal empire) with the slime
and offal of desperate servility--and we cannot but consider the
Essay as one of the poisonous ingredients thrown into the cauldron of
Legitimacy "to make it thick and slab. " Our author has, indeed, so
far done service to the cause of truth, that he has counteracted
many capital errors formerly prevailing as to the universal and
indiscriminate encouragement of population under all circumstances; but
he has countenanced opposite errors, which if adopted in theory and
practice would be even more mischievous, and has left it to future
philosophers to follow up the principle, that some check must be
provided for the unrestrained progress of population, into a set of
wiser and more humane consequences. Mr. Godwin has lately attempted an
answer to the Essay (thus giving Mr. Malthus a _Roland for his Oliver_)
but we think he has judged ill in endeavouring to invalidate the
principle, instead of confining himself to point out the misapplication
of it. There is one argument introduced in this Reply, which will,
perhaps, amuse the reader as a sort of metaphysical puzzle.
"It has sometimes occurred to me whether Mr. Malthus did not catch the
first hint of his geometrical ratio from a curious passage of Judge
Blackstone, on consanguinity, which is as follows:--
"The doctrine of lineal consanguinity is sufficiently plain and obvious;
but it is at the first view astonishing to consider the number of lineal
ancestors which every man has within no very great number of degrees:
and so many different bloods is a man said to contain in his veins, as
he hath lineal ancestors. Of these he hath two in the first ascending
degree, his own parents; he hath four in the second, the parents of his
father and the parents of his mother; he hath eight in the third, the
parents of his two grandfathers and two grandmothers; and by the same
rule of progression, he hath an hundred and twenty-eight in the seventh;
a thousand and twenty-four in the tenth; and at the twentieth degree, or
the distance of twenty generations, every man hath above a million of
ancestors, as common arithmetic will demonstrate.
"This will seem surprising to those who are unacquainted with the
increasing power of progressive numbers; but is palpably evident from
the following table of a geometrical progression, in which the first
term is 2, and the denominator also 2; or, to speak more intelligibly,
it is evident, for that each of us has two ancestors in the first
degree; the number of which is doubled at every remove, because each of
our ancestors had also two ancestors of his own.
_Lineal Degrees. _ _Number of Ancestors_.
1 . . . . . . 2
2 . . . . . . 4
3 . . . . . . 8
4 . . . . . . 16
5 . . . . . . 32
6 . . . . . . 64
7 . . . . . . 128
8 . . . . . . 256
9 . . . . . . 512
10 . . . . . . 1024
11 . . . . . . 2048
12 . . . . . . 4096
13 . . . . . . 8192
14 . . . . . . 16,384
15 . . . . . . 32,768
16 . . . . . . 65,536
17 . . . . . . 131,072
18 . . . . . . 262,144
19 . . . . . . 524,288
20 . . . . . . 1,048,576
"This argument, however," (proceeds Mr. Godwin) "from Judge Blackstone
of a geometrical progression would much more naturally apply to
Montesquieu's hypothesis of the depopulation of the world, and prove
that the human species is hastening fast to extinction, than to the
purpose for which Mr. Malthus has employed it. An ingenious sophism
might be raised upon it, to shew that the race of mankind will
ultimately terminate in unity. Mr. Malthus, indeed, should have
reflected, that it is much more certain that every man has had ancestors
than that he will have posterity, and that it is still more doubtful,
whether he will have posterity to twenty or to an indefinite number of
generations. "--ENQUIRY CONCERNING POPULATION, p. 100.
Mr. Malthus's style is correct and elegant; his tone of controversy mild
and gentlemanly; and the care with which he has brought his facts and
documents together, deserves the highest praise. He has lately quitted
his favourite subject of population, and broke a lance with Mr. Ricardo
on the question of rent and value. The partisans of Mr. Ricardo, who are
also the admirers of Mr. Malthus, say that the usual sagacity of the
latter has here failed him, and that he has shewn himself to be a very
illogical writer. To have said this of him formerly on another ground,
was accounted a heresy and a piece of presumption not easily to be
forgiven. Indeed Mr. Malthus has always been a sort of "darling in the
public eye," whom it was unsafe to meddle with. He has contrived to
make himself as many friends by his attacks on the schemes of _Human
Perfectibility_ and on the _Poor-Laws_, as Mandeville formerly procured
enemies by his attacks on _Human Perfections_ and on _Charity-Schools_;
and among other instances that we might mention, _Plug_ Pulteney, the
celebrated miser, of whom Mr. Burke said on his having a large
estate left him, "that now it was to be hoped he would _set up a
pocket-handkerchief_," was so enamoured with the saving schemes and
humane economy of the Essay, that he desired a friend to find out the
author and offer him a church living! This liberal intention was (by
design or accident) unhappily frustrated.
* * * * *
MR. GIFFORD.
Mr. Gifford was originally bred to some handicraft: he afterwards
contrived to learn Latin, and was for some time an usher in a school,
till he became a tutor in a nobleman's family. The low-bred, self-taught
man, the pedant, and the dependant on the great contribute to form the
Editor of the _Quarterly Review_. He is admirably qualified for this
situation, which he has held for some years, by a happy combination of
defects, natural and acquired; and in the event of his death, it will be
difficult to provide him a suitable successor.
Mr. Gifford has no pretensions to be thought a man of genius, of taste,
or even of general knowledge. He merely understands the mechanical and
instrumental part of learning. He is a critic of the last age, when
the different editions of an author, or the dates of his several
performances were all that occupied the inquiries of a profound scholar,
and the spirit of the writer or the beauties of his style were left to
shift for themselves, or exercise the fancy of the light and superficial
reader. In studying an old author, he has no notion of any thing beyond
adjusting a point, proposing a different reading, or correcting, by the
collation of various copies, an error of the press. In appreciating a
modern one, if it is an enemy, the first thing he thinks of is to charge
him with bad grammar--he scans his sentences instead of weighing his
sense; or if it is a friend, the highest compliment he conceives it
possible to pay him is, that his thoughts and expressions are moulded
on some hackneyed model. His standard of _ideal_ perfection is what he
himself now is, a person of _mediocre_ literary attainments: his utmost
contempt is shewn by reducing any one to what he himself once was, a
person without the ordinary advantages of education and learning. It is
accordingly assumed, with much complacency in his critical pages, that
Tory writers are classical and courtly as a matter of course; as it is
a standing jest and evident truism, that Whigs and Reformers must be
persons of low birth and breeding--imputations from one of which he
himself has narrowly escaped, and both of which he holds in suitable
abhorrence. He stands over a contemporary performance with all the
self-conceit and self-importance of a country schoolmaster, tries it by
technical rules, affects not to understand the meaning, examines the
hand-writing, the spelling, shrugs up his shoulders and chuckles over a
slip of the pen, and keeps a sharp look-out for a false concord and--a
flogging. There is nothing liberal, nothing humane in his style of
judging: it is altogether petty, captious, and literal. The Editor's
political subserviency adds the last finishing to his ridiculous
pedantry and vanity. He has all his life been a follower in the train
of wealth and power--strives to back his pretensions on Parnassus by a
place at court, and to gild his reputation as a man of letters by the
smile of greatness. He thinks his works are stamped with additional
value by having his name in the _Red-Book_.
He looks up to the
distinctions of rank and station as he does to those of learning, with
the gross and overweening adulation of his early origin. All his notions
are low, upstart, servile. He thinks it the highest honour to a poet to
be patronised by a peer or by some dowager of quality. He is prouder
of a court-livery than of a laurel-wreath; and is only sure of having
established his claims to respectability by having sacrificed those of
independence. He is a retainer to the Muses; a door-keeper to learning;
a lacquey in the state. He believes that modern literature should wear
the fetters of classical antiquity; that truth is to be weighed in the
scales of opinion and prejudice; that power is equivalent to right; that
genius is dependent on rules; that taste and refinement of language
consist in _word-catching_. Many persons suppose that Mr. Gifford knows
better than he pretends; and that he is shrewd, artful, and designing.
But perhaps it may be nearer the mark to suppose that his dulness is
guarantee for his sincerity; or that before he is the tool of the
profligacy of others, he is the dupe of his own jaundiced feelings, and
narrow, hoodwinked perceptions.
"Destroy his fib or sophistry: in vain--
The creature's at his dirty work again! "
But this is less from choice or perversity, than because he cannot help
it and can do nothing else. He damns a beautiful expression less out
of spite than because he really does not understand it: any novelty of
thought or sentiment gives him a shock from which he cannot recover
for some time, and he naturally takes his revenge for the alarm and
uneasiness occasioned him, without referring to venal or party motives.
He garbles an author's meaning, not so much wilfully, as because it is a
pain to him to enlarge his microscopic view to take in the context, when
a particular sentence or passage has struck him as quaint and out of the
way: he fly-blows an author's style, and picks out detached words and
phrases for cynical reprobation, simply because he feels himself at
home, or takes a pride and pleasure in this sort of petty warfare. He is
tetchy and impatient of contradiction; sore with wounded pride; angry
at obvious faults, more angry at unforeseen beauties. He has the
_chalk-stones_ in his understanding, and from being used to long
confinement, cannot bear the slightest jostling or irregularity of
motion. He may call out with the fellow in the _Tempest_--"I am not
Stephano, but a cramp! " He would go back to the standard of opinions,
style, the faded ornaments, and insipid formalities that came into
fashion about forty years ago. Flashes of thought, flights of fancy,
idiomatic expressions, he sets down among the signs of the times--the
extraordinary occurrences of the age we live in. They are marks of a
restless and revolutionary spirit: they disturb his composure of mind,
and threaten (by implication) the safety of the state. His slow,
snail-paced, bed-rid habits of reasoning cannot keep up with the
whirling, eccentric motion, the rapid, perhaps extravagant combinations
of modern literature. He has long been stationary himself, and is
determined that others shall remain so. The hazarding a paradox is like
letting off a pistol close to his ear: he is alarmed and offended. The
using an elliptical mode of expression (such as he did not use to find
in Guides to the English Tongue) jars him like coming suddenly to a
step in a flight of stairs that you were not aware of. He _pishes_ and
_pshaws_ at all this, exercises a sort of interjectional criticism on
what excites his spleen, his envy, or his wonder, and hurls his meagre
anathemas _ex cathedrâ_ at all those writers who are indifferent alike
to his precepts and his example!
Mr. Gifford, in short, is possessed of that sort of learning which is
likely to result from an over-anxious desire to supply the want of the
first rudiments of education; that sort of wit, which is the offspring
of ill-humour or bodily pain; that sort of sense, which arises from a
spirit of contradiction and a disposition to cavil at and dispute
the opinions of others; and that sort of reputation, which is the
consequence of bowing to established authority and ministerial
influence. He dedicates to some great man, and receives his compliments
in return. He appeals to some great name, and the Under-graduates of the
two Universities look up to him as an oracle of wisdom. He throws the
weight of his verbal criticism and puny discoveries in _black-letter_
reading into the gap, that is supposed to be making in the Constitution
by Whigs and Radicals, whom he qualifies without mercy as dunces and
miscreants; and so entitles himself to the protection of Church and
State. The character of his mind is an utter want of independence and
magnanimity in all that he attempts. He cannot go alone, he must have
crutches, a go-cart and trammels, or he is timid, fretful, and helpless
as a child. He cannot conceive of any thing different from what he finds
it, and hates those who pretend to a greater reach of intellect
or boldness of spirit than himself. He inclines, by a natural and
deliberate bias, to the traditional in laws and government; to
the orthodox in religion; to the safe in opinion; to the trite in
imagination; to the technical in style; to whatever implies a surrender
of individual judgment into the hands of authority, and a subjection of
individual feeling to mechanic rules. If he finds any one flying in the
face of these, or straggling from the beaten path, he thinks he has them
at a notable disadvantage, and falls foul of them without loss of time,
partly to soothe his own sense of mortified self-consequence, and as an
edifying spectacle to his legitimate friends. He takes none but unfair
advantages. He _twits_ his adversaries (that is, those who are not
in the leading-strings of his school or party) with some personal or
accidental defect. If a writer has been punished for a political libel,
he is sure to hear of it in a literary criticism. If a lady goes on
crutches and is out of favour at court, she is reminded of it in Mr.
Gilford's manly satire. He sneers at people of low birth or who have
not had a college-education, partly to hide his own want of certain
advantages, partly as well-timed flattery to those who possess them. He
has a right to laugh at poor, unfriended, untitled genius from wearing
the livery of rank and letters, as footmen behind a coronet-coach laugh
at the rabble. He keeps good company, and forgets himself. He stands at
the door of Mr. Murray's shop, and will not let any body pass but the
well-dressed mob, or some followers of the court. To edge into the
_Quarterly_ Temple of Fame the candidate must have a diploma from the
Universities, a passport from the Treasury. Otherwise, it is a breach of
etiquette to let him pass, an insult to the better sort who aspire to
the love of letters--and may chance to drop in to the _Feast of the
Poets_. Or, if he cannot manage it thus, or get rid of the claim on the
bare ground of poverty or want of school-learning, he _trumps_ up an
excuse for the occasion, such as that "a man was confined in Newgate a
short time before"--it is not a _lie_ on the part of the critic, it is
only an amiable subserviency to the will of his betters, like that of
a menial who is ordered to deny his master, a sense of propriety, a
knowledge of the world, a poetical and moral license. Such fellows
(such is his cue from his employers) should at any rate be kept out of
privileged places: persons who have been convicted of prose-libels ought
not to be suffered to write poetry--if the fact was not exactly as it
was stated, it was something of the kind, or it _ought_ to have been
so, the assertion was a pious fraud,--the public, the court, the prince
himself might read the work, but for this mark of opprobrium set upon
it--it was not to be endured that an insolent plebeian should aspire to
elegance, taste, fancy--it was throwing down the barriers which ought
to separate the higher and the lower classes, the loyal and the
disloyal--the paraphrase of the story of Dante was therefore to perform
quarantine, it was to seem not yet recovered from the gaol infection,
there was to be a taint upon it, as there was none in it--and all this
was performed by a single slip of Mr. Gifford's pen! We would willingly
believe (if we could) that in this case there was as much weakness and
prejudice as there was malice and cunning. --Again, we do not think it
possible that under any circumstances the writer of the _Verses to Anna_
could enter into the spirit or delicacy of Mr. Keats's poetry. The fate
of the latter somewhat resembled that of
--"a bud bit by an envious worm,
Ere it could spread its sweet leaves to the air,
Or dedicate its beauty to the sun. "
Mr. Keats's ostensible crime was that he had been praised in the
_Examiner Newspaper_: a greater and more unpardonable offence probably
was, that he was a true poet, with all the errors and beauties of
youthful genius to answer for. Mr. Gifford was as insensible to the one
as he was inexorable to the other. Let the reader judge from the two
subjoined specimens how far the one writer could ever, without a
presumption equalled only by a want of self-knowledge, set himself in
judgment on the other.
"Out went the taper as she hurried in;
Its little smoke in pallid moonshine died:
She closed the door, she panted, all akin
To spirits of the air and visions wide:
No utter'd syllable, or woe betide!
But to her heart, her heart was voluble,
Paining with eloquence her balmy side;
As though a tongueless nightingale should swell
Her heart in vain, and die, heart-stifled, in her dell.
"A casement high and triple-arch'd there was,
All garlanded with carven imag'ries
Of fruits, and flowers, and bunches of knot-grass,
And diamonded with panes of quaint device,
Innumerable of stains and splendid dyes,
As are the tiger-moth's deep-damask'd wings;
And in the midst, 'mong thousand heraldries,
And twilight saints and dim emblazonings,
A shielded scutcheon blush'd with blood of queens and kings.
"Full on this casement shone the wintry moon,
And threw warm gules on Madeline's fair breast,
As down she knelt for Heaven's grace and boon;
Rose-bloom fell on her hands, together prest,
And on her silver cross soft amethyst,
And on her hair a glory, like a Saint:
She seem'd a splendid angel, newly drest,
Save wings, for heaven:--Porphyro grew faint:
She knelt, so pure a thing, so free from mortal taint.
"Anon his heart revives: her vespers done,
Of all its wreathed pearls her hair she frees;
Unclasps her warmed jewels one by one;
Loosens her fragrant boddice; by degrees
Her rich attire creeps rustling to her knees:
Half-hidden, like a mermaid in sea-weed,
Pensive awhile she dreams awake, and sees,
In fancy, fair St. Agnes in her bed,
But dares not look behind, or all the charm is fled.
"Soon trembling in her soft and chilly nest,
In sort of wakeful swoon, perplex'd she lay,
Until the poppied warmth of sleep oppress'd
Her soothed limbs, and soul fatigued away
Flown, like a thought, until the morrow-day:
Blissfully haven'd both from joy and pain;
Clasp'd like a missal where swart Paynims pray;
Blinded alike from sunshine and from rain,
As though a rose should shut, and be a bud again. "
EVE OF ST. AGNES.
With the rich beauties and the dim obscurities of lines like these, let
us contrast the Verses addressed _To a Tuft of early Violets_ by the
fastidious author of the Baviad and Mæviad. --
"Sweet flowers! that from your humble beds
Thus prematurely dare to rise,
And trust your unprotected heads
To cold Aquarius' watery skies.
"Retire, retire! _These_ tepid airs
Are not the genial brood of May;
_That_ sun with light malignant glares,
And flatters only to betray.
"Stern Winter's reign is not yet past--
Lo! while your buds prepare to blow,
On icy pinions comes the blast,
And nips your root, and lays you low.
"Alas, for such ungentle doom!
But I will shield you; and supply
A kindlier soil on which to bloom,
A nobler bed on which to die.
"Come then--'ere yet the morning ray
Has drunk the dew that gems your crest,
And drawn your balmiest sweets away;
O come and grace my Anna's breast.
"Ye droop, fond flowers! But did ye know
What worth, what goodness there reside,
Your cups with liveliest tints would glow;
And spread their leaves with conscious pride.
"For there has liberal Nature joined
Her riches to the stores of Art,
And added to the vigorous mind
The soft, the sympathising heart.
"Come, then--'ere yet the morning ray
Has drunk the dew that gems your crest,
And drawn your balmiest sweets away;
O come and grace my Anna's breast.
"O! I should think--_that fragrant bed_
_Might I but hope with you to share_--[A]
Years of anxiety repaid
By one short hour of transport there.
"More blest than me, thus shall ye live
Your little day; and when ye die,
Sweet flowers! the grateful Muse shall give
A verse; the sorrowing maid, a sigh.
"While I alas! no distant date,
Mix with the dust from whence I came,
Without a friend to weep my fate,
Without a stone to tell my name. "
We subjoin one more specimen of these "wild strains"[B] said to be
"_Written two years after the preceding_. " ECCE ITERUM CRISPINUS.
"I wish I was where Anna lies;
For I am sick of lingering here,
And every hour Affection cries,
Go, and partake her humble bier.
"I wish I could! for when she died
I lost my all; and life has prov'd
Since that sad hour a dreary void,
A waste unlovely and unlov'd.
"But who, when I am turn'd to clay,
Shall duly to her grave repair,
And pluck the ragged moss away,
And weeds that have "no business there? "
"And who, with pious hand, shall bring
The flowers she cherish'd, snow-drops cold,
And violets that unheeded spring,
To scatter o'er her hallow'd mould?
"And who, while Memory loves to dwell
Upon her name for ever dear,
Shall feel his heart with passion swell,
And pour the bitter, bitter tear?
"I did it; and would fate allow,
Should visit still, should still deplore--
But health and strength have left me now,
But I, alas! can weep no more.
"Take then, sweet maid! this simple strain,
The last I offer at thy shrine;
Thy grave must then undeck'd remain,
And all thy memory fade with mine.
"And can thy soft persuasive look,
That voice that might with music vie,
Thy air that every gazer took,
Thy matchless eloquence of eye,
"Thy spirits, frolicsome as good,
Thy courage, by no ills dismay'd,
Thy patience, by no wrongs subdued,
Thy gay good-humour--can they "fade? "
"Perhaps--but sorrow dims my eye:
Cold turf, which I no more must view,
Dear name, which I no more must sigh,
A long, a last, a sad adieu! "
It may be said in extenuation of the low, mechanic vein of these
impoverished lines, that they were written at an early age--they were
the inspired production of a youthful lover! Mr. Gifford was thirty when
he wrote them, Mr. Keats died when he was scarce twenty! Farther it may
be said, that Mr. Gifford hazarded his first poetical attempts under all
the disadvantages of a neglected education: but the same circumstance,
together with a few unpruned redundancies of fancy and quaintnesses of
expression, was made the plea on which Mr. Keats was hooted out of the
world, and his fine talents and wounded sensibilities consigned to an
early grave. In short, the treatment of this heedless candidate for
poetical fame might serve as a warning, and was intended to serve as a
warning to all unfledged tyros, how they venture upon any such doubtful
experiments, except under the auspices of some lord of the bedchamber or
Government Aristarchus, and how they imprudently associate themselves
with men of mere popular talent or independence of feeling! --It is the
same in prose works. The Editor scorns to enter the lists of argument
with any proscribed writer of the opposite party. He does not refute,
but denounces him. He makes no concessions to an adversary, lest they
should in some way be turned against him. He only feels himself safe in
the fancied insignificance of others: he only feels himself superior
to those whom he stigmatizes as the lowest of mankind. All persons are
without common-sense and honesty who do not believe implicitly (with
him) in the immaculateness of Ministers and the divine origin of Kings.
Thus he informed the world that the author of TABLE-TALK was a person
who could not write a sentence of common English and could hardly spell
his own name, because he was not a friend to the restoration of the
Bourbons, and had the assurance to write _Characters of Shakespears
Plays_ in a style of criticism somewhat different from Mr. Gifford's. He
charged this writer with imposing on the public by a flowery style; and
when the latter ventured to refer to a work of his, called _An Essay on
the Principles of Human Action_, which has not a single ornament in it,
as a specimen of his original studies and the proper bias of his mind,
the learned critic, with a shrug of great self-satisfaction, said, "It
was amusing to see this person, sitting like one of Brouwer's Dutch
boors over his gin and tobacco-pipes, and fancying himself a Leibnitz! "
The question was, whether the subject of Mr. Gifford's censure had ever
written such a work or not; for if he had, he had amused himself with
something besides gin and tobacco-pipes. But our Editor, by virtue
of the situation he holds, is superior to facts or arguments: he is
accountable neither to the public nor to authors for what he says of
them, but owes it to his employers to prejudice the work and vilify the
writer, if the latter is not avowedly ready to range himself on the
stronger side. --The _Quarterly Review_, besides the political _tirades_
and denunciations of suspected writers, intended for the guidance of the
heads of families, is filled up with accounts of books of Voyages
and Travels for the amusement of the younger branches. The poetical
department is almost a sinecure, consisting of mere summary decisions
and a list of quotations. Mr. Croker is understood to contribute the
St. Helena articles and the liberality, Mr. Canning the practical good
sense, Mr. D'Israeli the good-nature, Mr. Jacob the modesty, Mr. Southey
the consistency, and the Editor himself the chivalrous spirit and the
attacks on Lady Morgan. It is a double crime, and excites a double
portion of spleen in the Editor, when female writers are not advocates
of passive obedience and non-resistance. This Journal, then, is a
depository for every species of political sophistry and personal
calumny. There is no abuse or corruption that does not there find a
jesuitical palliation or a bare-faced vindication. There we meet the
slime of hypocrisy, the varnish of courts, the cant of pedantry, the
cobwebs of the law, the iron hand of power. Its object is as mischievous
as the means by which it is pursued are odious. The intention is to
poison the sources of public opinion and of individual fame--to pervert
literature, from being the natural ally of freedom and humanity, into an
engine of priestcraft and despotism, and to undermine the spirit of the
English Constitution and the independence of the English character.
The Editor and his friends systematically explode every principle of
liberty, laugh patriotism and public spirit to scorn, resent every
pretence to integrity as a piece of singularity or insolence, and strike
at the root of all free inquiry or discussion, by running down every
writer as a vile scribbler and a bad member of society, who is not
a hireling and a slave. No means are stuck at in accomplishing this
laudable end. Strong in patronage, they trample on truth, justice, and
decency. They claim the privilege of court-favourites. They keep as
little faith with the public, as with their opponents. No statement in
the _Quarterly Review_ is to be trusted: there is no fact that is not
misrepresented in it, no quotation that is not garbled, no character
that is not slandered, if it can answer the purposes of a party to do
so. The weight of power, of wealth, of rank is thrown into the scale,
gives its impulse to the machine; and the whole is under the guidance of
Mr. Gifford's instinctive genius--of the inborn hatred of servility for
independence, of dulness for talent, of cunning and impudence for truth
and honesty. It costs him no effort to execute his disreputable task--in
being the tool of a crooked policy, he but labours in his natural
vocation. He patches up a rotten system as he would supply the chasms in
a worm-eaten manuscript, from a grovelling incapacity to do any thing
better; thinks that if a single iota in the claims of prerogative and
power were lost, the whole fabric of society would fall upon his
head and crush him; and calculates that his best chance for literary
reputation is by _black-balling_ one half of the competitors as
Jacobins and levellers, and securing the suffrages of the other half in
his favour as a loyal subject and trusty partisan!
Mr. Gifford, as a satirist, is violent and abrupt. He takes obvious or
physical defects, and dwells upon them with much labour and harshness of
invective, but with very little wit or spirit. He expresses a great deal
of anger and contempt, but you cannot tell very well why--except that he
seems to be sore and out of humour. His satire is mere peevishness and
spleen, or something worse--personal antipathy and rancour. We are in
quite as much pain for the writer, as for the object of his resentment.
His address to Peter Pindar is laughable from its outrageousness. He
denounces him as a wretch hateful to God and man, for some of the most
harmless and amusing trifles that ever were written--and the very good-
humour and pleasantry of which, we suspect, constituted their offence in
the eyes of this Drawcansir. --His attacks on Mrs. Robinson were unmanly,
and even those on Mr. Merry and the Della-Cruscan School were much
more ferocious than the occasion warranted. A little affectation and
quaintness of style did not merit such severity of castigation. [C] As a
translator, Mr. Gifford's version of the Roman satirist is the baldest,
and, in parts, the most offensive of all others. We do not know why
he attempted it, unless he had got it in his head that he should thus
follow in the steps of Dryden, as he had already done in those of Pope
in the Baviad and Maeviad. As an editor of old authors, Mr. Gifford is
entitled to considerable praise for the pains he has taken in revising
the text, and for some improvements he has introduced into it. He had
better have spared the notes, in which, though he has detected the
blunders of previous commentators, he has exposed his own ill-temper and
narrowness of feeling more. As a critic, he has thrown no light on the
character and spirit of his authors. He has shewn no striking power of
analysis nor of original illustration, though he has chosen to exercise
his pen on writers most congenial to his own turn of mind, from their
dry and caustic vein; Massinger, and Ben Jonson. What he will make of
Marlowe, it is difficult to guess. He has none of "the fiery quality"
of the poet. Mr. Gifford does not take for his motto on these
occasions--_Spiritus precipitandus est! _--His most successful efforts in
this way are barely respectable. In general, his observations are petty,
ill-concocted, and discover as little _tact_, as they do a habit of
connected reasoning. Thus, for instance, in attempting to add the name
of Massinger to the list of Catholic poets, our minute critic insists
on the profusion of crucifixes, glories, angelic visions, garlands of
roses, and clouds of incense scattered through the _Virgin-Martyr,_ as
evidence of the theological sentiments meant to be inculcated by the
play, when the least reflection might have taught him, that they proved
nothing but the author's poetical conception of the character and
_costume_ of his subject. A writer might, with the same sinister,
short-sighted shrewdness, be accused of Heathenism for talking of Flora
and Ceres in a poem on the Seasons! What are produced as the exclusive
badges and occult proofs of Catholic bigotry, are nothing but the
adventitious ornaments and external symbols, the gross and sensible
language, in a word, the _poetry_ of Christianity in general. What
indeed shews the frivolousness of the whole inference is that Deckar,
who is asserted by our critic to have contributed some of the most
passionate and fantastic of these devotional scenes, is not even
suspected of a leaning to Popery. In like manner, he excuses Massinger
for the grossness of one of his plots (that of the _Unnatural Combat_)
by saying that it was supposed to take place before the Christian era;
by this shallow common-place persuading himself, or fancying he could
persuade others, that the crime in question (which yet on the very face
of the story is made the ground of a tragic catastrophe) was first made
_statutory_ by the Christian religion.
The foregoing is a harsh criticism, and may be thought illiberal. But as
Mr. Gifford assumes a right to say what he pleases of others--they may
be allowed to speak the truth of him!
[Footnote A: What an awkward bed-fellow for a tuft of violets! ]
[Footnote B:
"How oft, O Dart! what time the faithful pair
Walk'd forth, the fragrant hour of eve to share,
On thy romantic banks, have my _wild strains_
(Not yet forgot amidst my native plains)
While thou hast sweetly gurgled down the vale.
Filled up the pause of love's delightful tale!
While, ever as she read, the conscious maid,
By faultering voice and downcast looks betray'd,
Would blushing on her lover's neck recline,
And with her finger--point the tenderest line! "
_Mæviad_, pp. 194, 202.
Yet the author assures us just before, that in these "wild strains" "all
was plain. "
"Even then (admire, John Bell! my simple ways)
No heaven and hell danced madly through my lays,
No oaths, no execrations; _all was plain_;
Yet trust me, while thy ever jingling train
Chime their sonorous woes with frigid art,
And shock the reason and revolt the heart;
My hopes and fears, in nature's language drest,
Awakened love in many a gentle breast. "
_Ibid. _ v. 185-92.
If any one else had composed these "wild strains," in which "all is
plain," Mr. Gifford would have accused them of three things, "1.
Downright nonsense. 2. Downright frigidity. 3. Downright doggrel;" and
proceeded to anatomise them very cordially in his way. As it is, he is
thrilled with a very pleasing horror at his former scenes of tenderness,
and "gasps at the recollection" _of watery Aquarius_!
