No More Learning



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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.


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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.


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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.


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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


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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


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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


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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. The necessary medium of
interest and excitement is not to be conjured up. These con-
siderations, however, represent the least of the disadvantages
we are under in estimating English oratory at the close of the
eighteenth century. We do not even possess the great speeches
of that day in anything like completeness. The merest frag-
ments remain of the elder Pitt, perhaps the first among all English
orators. And we do not, apparently, find lengthy reports till about
the year 1800, while even these are, possibly, somewhat curtailed.
Of some of the greatest triumphs in debate of Fox, of the younger
Pitt and of Sheridan, we have only mangled remnants. One
doubtful merit alone seems left; in contradistinction to an orator's
4-2


## p. 52 (#74) ##############################################

52
[CH.
Political Writers and Speakers
published version of his speech, inevitably different from its spoken
form and addressed to a reading audience in another mood than
that of an excited assembly, they give us, at their best, what was
actually said, although in mere fragments, with the reasoning
maimed and the fire extinct.
After Burke, Charles James Fox was the senior of the group of
great orators in the mid reign of George III. He entered parlia-
ment in 1768 while still under age, but it was not till February
1775 that he first showed his powers in a speech in favour of
the Americans. Year by year, he grew in ability and debating
skill, and Lord Rockingham’s death in 1782 left him the undoubted
leader of the whigs. But he was now to share his preeminence
in oratory with a rival. William Pitt the younger entered the
commons in 1781, and his maiden speech at once raised him to the
front rank of speakers. Perhaps, English public speaking has
never again quite reached the level of those twenty-five years, when
Fox and Pitt carried on their magnificent contest. Whichever of
the two spoke last, said Wilberforce, seemed to have the best of
the argument. Burke, whose eloquence, in his speeches revised
for publication, and even in the verbatim report of what he said,
stands far higher as literature than theirs, could not compare with
them in effectiveness in actual speaking, or in the favour of the
House of Commons. It was admitted that their successors, Canning
and Grey, belonged to an inferior class of orators. The times were
peculiarly favourable. These men spoke on great affairs to a highly
critical, cultivated, but not pedantic, audience, which had been
accustomed to hear the very best debating and which demanded
both efficaciousness of reasoning, clearness of expression and
splendour of style. Thus, spurred on by sympathy and success,
the two masters of debate established a dual empire over the
house. Their powers of persuading those connoisseurs of oratory,
whom they addressed, appear, indeed, surprisingly small, when we
look at the division-lists; but, at least, they cast a triumphal robe
over the progress of events.
Like all great speakers, they were improvisers, and, in this
line, Fox was admitted to excel. He could come straight from
gambling at Brooks's, and enter with mastery into the debate.
He had an uncanny skill in traversing and reversing his opponents'
arguments, and in seizing on the weak point of a position. Then,
he would expose it to the House with a brilliantly witty illus-
tration. Admirable classic as he was, no one understood better
the genius of the English language. His thoughts poured out, for


## p. 53 (#75) ##############################################

II] Fox and the Younger Pitt 53
the most part, in short vigorous sentences, lucid and rhythmical to
a degree. Volubility, perhaps, was his fault, as was to be ex-
pected in an extemporary speaker, and there was little that was
architectural in his speeches. Without any rambling, they showed
but small subordination of parts; one point is made after another,
great and small together. Even his speech on the Westminster
scrutiny in 1784 has this defect, in spite of his cogent reasoning.
As a result, he often reads thin, not from spreading out his matter,
but from delaying over unimportant aspects of it. He was con-
vinced that he could refute anything, so he refuted everything.
But these blots were scarcely observable at the time. To a
marvellous extent, he possessed the ability to reason clearly at
the highest pressure of emotion.
He forgot himself and everything around him. He thought only of his
subject. His genius warmed and kindled as he went on. He darted fire into
his audience. Torrents of impetuous and irresistible eloquence swept along
their feelings and conviction 1.
On the whole, Pitt was more favoured in his delivery than
his competitor. Fox's clumsy figure, negligently dressed in
blue and buff, seemed unprepossessing ; only his shaggy eye-
brows added to the expression of his face; his voice would
rise to a bark in excitement. Pitt was always dignified and
composed :
In solemn dignity and sullen state,
This new Octavius rises to debate,
wrote George Ellis, carping, in The Rolliad. But his musical
voice, in spite of its monotony, enchanted the house, and his
manner carried authority with it. He was even more lucid than
Fox; the whole course of his argument lay clear even in an
unpremeditated speech. And he was far more selective in his
reasoning. Only the really decisive considerations were enforced
by him, and, in expounding a general policy, he was unequalled.
He was architectonic by nature; each speech is a symmetrical
building, proceeding from foundation to coping-stone. His
diction, the 'blaze of elocution' for which he was renowned, was
copious and graceful, but, also, prolix almost beyond endurance,
and too often leaves the impression that there is nothing in it,
and that Pitt himself either did not intend to say anything or was
concealing how little he had to say. The matter, indeed, is
generally commonplace, though there is a statesmanlike good
1 Sir James Mackintosh's journal, printed in Memoirs of the Life of the Rt Hon.
Sir James Mackintosh, ed. by his son, Mackintosh, R. J. , 1835, vol. I, pp. 322--5.


## p. 54 (#76) ##############################################

54
Political Writers and Speakers [CH.
sense about it which is unlike the perverse ingenuity of Fox,
adding argument to argument to obtain an unwise conclusion.
None the less, if Pitt's style be antiquated and, at times, stilted,
it can rise, as it does in his celebrated speech on the slave-trade
in 1792, to magnificent declamation. His perorations, growing
out of his preceding matter as they do, and containing definite
reasoning and not mere verbal finery, show him at his best. It
was in them that he displayed to the full his skill in the then
much prized art of Latin quotation. Every speaker, if he could,
quoted Latin verse to point his sayings; but Pitt excelled all in
his felicitous selection. Long-famous passages seemed hardly
quoted by him, it seemed rather that the orator's stately period
itself rose into poetry.
While Fox shone especially in the witty humour of an illustra-
tion, irresistibly quaint and full of a convincing sound sense, Pitt
employed a dry contumelious sarcasm, in which severe irony was
the distinguishing trait. Thus, he observed of a hopelessly muddled
speech that it was not, I presume, designed for a complete and
systematic view of the subject. Both orators, however, so far as
mere wit was concerned, were outdone by Richard Brinsley Sheri-
dan', who almost turned their dual supremacy into a triumvirate
of eloquence. But in spite of all his brilliancy, he was manifestly
outweighted; unlike Pitt and Fox, he had entered the period of
decline long before he quitted parliament. It is not easy, from
the mere reports of his speeches, to give a satisfactory account
of his comparative lack of weight and influence. He entered
parliament in the same year as Pitt, and his oratorical ability,
although, at first, it was somewhat clouded, soon obtained the
recognition it deserved ; one speech against Warren Hastings, in
February 1787, was declared by the auditors to be the best they had
ever heard. But, perhaps, he was too frankly an advocate, and he
was too clearly bound, by personal attachment, rather than by
interest, to the prince of Wales's chariot-wheels. Although his
special pleading by no means surpassed that of his contem-
poraries, it was more obvious, and his changes of opinion, due to
fresh developments of Napoleon's action, were not condoned as
were those of others. In 1812, the first debater of the day was
left out of parliament through the loss of the prince's favour, and
his political career was closed.
Wit-brilliant, sustained and polished to the utmost—distin-
guished Sheridan from his competitors. Many of his impromptu
i Concerning Sheridan as a dramatist, see post, chap. XII.


## p. 55 (#77) ##############################################

11]
Sheridan
and Grattan
55
>
speeches, alone in contemporary literature, have the true Junian
ring, and, were they known by later publication or could they
have been prepared beforehand, doubtless we should have been
told that they were 'tormented with the file. ' As it is, we must
own that balanced antithesis and mischievous scoffing were native
to him and his readiest means of expression, even if the Letters
of Junius provided him with a favourite model. Nor did his
merits end with wit. In the mere physical part of oratory, his
animated gay expression and his trained musical voice exercised
an 'inconceivable attraction,' although it may be that the absence
of 'violence or excess,' which is also recorded, may have led to
an impression that he was not in earnest. In spite of this, his
gaiety could be very bitter ; and, so far as the words went, his
higher flights could be as impassioned as any. Yet, his merit was
his defect; he is not absorbed in his subject like Fox, or delivering
a ruler's oracles like Pitt; we feel, all along, that here is a celebrated
author, enjoying the use of his powers, impassioned on principles
of taste and arguing with the conscious pleasure of the case-
maker. He bears print better than the two greater men; but, in
the real test of an orator—the spoken word-he was, admittedly,
their inferior.
That weight and respect which Sheridan never gained was
amply enjoyed by his fellow-countryman, Henry Grattan. Perhaps,
as a statesman from his youth up, whose whole energies were en-
grossed in politics and government, he had an inevitable advantage
over the brilliant literary amateur. But the main causes lie deep,
in divergences of genius and temperament. Grattan had none of
Sheridan's exterior advantages ; his gestures were uncouth, his
enunciation difficult. He surmounted these impediments, how-
ever, almost at once, both on his entry into the Irish parliament,
in 1775, and on that into the parliament of the United Kingdom, in
1805. In the former case, he led the party which obtained Irish
legislative independence, and inaugurated a period called by his
name; in the latter, at the time of his death, he had become
venerated as the last survivor of the giants of debate among a
lesser generation. A certain magnanimity in Grattan corresponded
to the greatness of his public career. His fiercest invective, how-
ever severe in intent and effect, had an old-world courtliness. Of
persiflage he knew nothing; his wit, of which he had plenty, was
dignified and almost stern. "You can scarcely answer a prophet;
you can only disbelieve him,' he said grimly, in 1800, of the Irish
predictions of Pitt.