No More Learning

Mr. Crabbe's earliest poem of the
_Village_ was recommended to the notice of Dr. Johnson by Sir Joshua
Reynolds; and we cannot help thinking that a taste for that sort of
poetry, which leans for support on the truth and fidelity of its
imitations of nature, began to display itself much about that time, and,
in a good measure, in consequence of the direction of the public taste
to the subject of painting. Book-learning, the accumulation of wordy
common-places, the gaudy pretensions of poetical fiction, had enfeebled
and perverted our eye for nature. The study of the fine arts, which came
into fashion about forty years ago, and was then first considered as a
polite accomplishment, would tend imperceptibly to restore it. Painting
is essentially an imitative art; it cannot subsist for a moment on empty
generalities: the critic, therefore, who had been used to this sort of
substantial entertainment, would be disposed to read poetry with the
eye of a connoisseur, would be little captivated with smooth, polished,
unmeaning periods, and would turn with double eagerness and relish to
the force and precision of individual details, transferred, as it were,
to the page from the canvas. Thus an admirer of Teniers or Hobbima
might think little of the pastoral sketches of Pope or Goldsmith; even
Thompson describes not so much the naked object as what he sees in his
mind's eye, surrounded and glowing with the mild, bland, genial vapours
of his brain:--but the adept in Dutch interiors, hovels, and pig-styes
must find in Mr. Crabbe a man after his own heart. He is the very thing
itself; he paints in words, instead of colours: there is no other
difference. As Mr. Crabbe is not a painter, only because he does not use
a brush and colours, so he is for the most part a poet, only because
he writes in lines of ten syllables. All the rest might be found in a
newspaper, an old magazine, or a county-register. Our author is himself
a little jealous of the prudish fidelity of his homely Muse, and tries
to justify himself by precedents. He brings as a parallel instance of
merely literal description, Pope's lines on the gay Duke of Buckingham,
beginning "In the worst inn's worst room see Villiers lies! " But surely
nothing can be more dissimilar. Pope describes what is striking, Crabbe
would have described merely what was there. The objects in Pope stand
out to the fancy from the mixture of the mean with the gaudy, from the
contrast of the scene and the character. There is an appeal to the
imagination; you see what is passing in a poetical point of view. In
Crabbe there is no foil, no contrast, no impulse given to the mind. It
is all on a level and of a piece. In fact, there is so little connection
between the subject-matter of Mr. Crabbe's lines and the ornament of
rhyme which is tacked to them, that many of his verses read like serious
burlesque, and the parodies which have been made upon them are hardly so
quaint as the originals.

Mr. Crabbe's great fault is certainly that he is a sickly, a querulous,
a uniformly dissatisfied poet. He sings the country; and he sings it in
a pitiful tone. He chooses this subject only to take the charm out of
it, and to dispel the illusion, the glory, and the dream, which had
hovered over it in golden verse from Theocritus to Cowper. He sets out
with professing to overturn the theory which had hallowed a shepherd's
life, and made the names of grove and valley music to our ears, in order
to give us truth in its stead; but why not lay aside the fool's cap and
bells at once? Why not insist on the unwelcome reality in plain prose?
If our author is a poet, why trouble himself with statistics? If he is a
statistic writer, why set his ill news to harsh and grating verse? The
philosopher in painting the dark side of human nature may have reason
on his side, and a moral lesson or remedy in view. The tragic poet, who
shews the sad vicissitudes of things and the disappointments of the
passions, at least strengthens our yearnings after imaginary good, and
lends wings to our desires, by which we, "at one bound, high overleap
all bound" of actual suffering. But Mr. Crabbe does neither. He gives
us discoloured paintings of life; helpless, repining, unprofitable,
unedifying distress. He is not a philosopher, but a sophist, a
misanthrope in verse; a _namby-pamby_ Mandeville, a Malthus turned
metrical romancer. He professes historical fidelity; but his vein is not
dramatic; nor does he give us the _pros_ and _cons_ of that versatile
gipsey, Nature. He does not indulge his fancy, or sympathise with us, or
tell us how the poor feel; but how he should feel in their situation,
which we do not want to know. He does not weave the web of their lives
of a mingled yarn, good and ill together, but clothes them all in the
same dingy linsey-woolsey, or tinges them with a green and yellow
melancholy. He blocks out all possibility of good, cancels the hope, or
even the wish for it as a weakness; check-mates Tityrus and Virgil at
the game of pastoral cross-purposes, disables all his adversary's white
pieces, and leaves none but black ones on the board. The situation of a
country clergyman is not necessarily favourable to the cultivation of
the Muse. He is set down, perhaps, as he thinks, in a small curacy for
life, and he takes his revenge by imprisoning the reader's imagination
in luckless verse. Shut out from social converse, from learned colleges
and halls, where he passed his youth, he has no cordial fellow-feeling
with the unlettered manners of the _Village_ or the _Borough_; and he
describes his neighbours as more uncomfortable and discontented than
himself. All this while he dedicates successive volumes to rising
generations of noble patrons; and while he desolates a line of coast
with sterile, blighting lines, the only leaf of his books where honour,
beauty, worth, or pleasure bloom, is that inscribed to the Rutland
family! We might adduce instances of what we have said from every page
of his works: let one suffice--

"Thus by himself compelled to live each day,
To wait for certain hours the tide's delay;
At the same times the same dull views to see,
The bounding marsh-bank and the blighted tree;
The water only when the tides were high,
When low, the mud half-covered and half-dry;
The sun-burnt tar that blisters on the planks,
And bank-side stakes in their uneven ranks;
Heaps of entangled weeds that slowly float,
As the tide rolls by the impeded boat.
When tides were neap, and in the sultry day,
Through the tall bounding mud-banks made their way,
Which on each side rose swelling, and below
The dark warm flood ran silently and slow;
There anchoring, Peter chose from man to hide,
There hang his head, and view the lazy tide
In its hot slimy channel slowly glide;
Where the small eels, that left the deeper way
For the warm shore, within the shallows play;
Where gaping muscles, left upon the mud,
Slope their slow passage to the fall'n flood:
Here dull and hopeless he'd lie down and trace
How side-long crabs had crawled their crooked race;
Or sadly listen to the tuneless cry
Of fishing gull or clanging golden-eye;
What time the sea-birds to the marsh would come,
And the loud bittern, from the bull-rush home,
Gave from the salt ditch-side the bellowing boom:
He nursed the feelings these dull scenes produce
And loved to stop beside the opening sluice;
Where the small stream, confined in narrow bound,
Ran with a dull, unvaried, saddening sound;
Where all, presented to the eye or ear,
Oppressed the soul with misery, grief, and fear. "

This is an exact _fac-simile_ of some of the most unlovely parts of the
creation. Indeed the whole of Mr. Crabbe's _Borough_, from which the
above passage is taken, is done so to the life, that it seems almost
like some sea-monster, crawled out of the neighbouring slime, and
harbouring a breed of strange vermin, with a strong local scent of
tar and bulge-water. Mr. Crabbe's _Tales_ are more readable than his
_Poems_; but in proportion as the interest increases, they become more
oppressive. They turn, one and all, upon the same sort of teazing,
helpless, mechanical, unimaginative distress;--and though it is not
easy to lay them down, you never wish to take them up again. Still in
this way, they are highly finished, striking, and original portraits,
worked out with an eye to nature, and an intimate knowledge of the
small and intricate folds of the human heart. Some of the best are
the _Confidant_, the story of _Silly Shore_, the _Young Poet_, the
_Painter_. The episode of _Phoebe Dawson_ in the _Village_, is one of
the most tender and pensive; and the character of the methodist parson
who persecutes the sailor's widow with his godly, selfish love, is one
of the most profound. In a word, if Mr. Crabbe's writings do not add
greatly to the store of entertaining and delightful fiction, yet they
will remain "as a thorn in the side of poetry," perhaps for a century to
come!


[Footnote A:

"Like angels' visits, short and far between. "--.
_Blair's Grave_. ]

[Footnote B: Is not this word, which occurs in the last line but one,
(as well as before) an instance of that repetition, which we so often
meet with in the most correct and elegant writers? ]





* * * * *





SIR JAMES MACKINTOSH.



The subject of the present article is one of the ablest and most
accomplished men of the age, both as a writer, a speaker, and a
converser. He is, in fact, master of almost every known topic, whether
of a passing or of a more recondite nature. He has lived much in
society, and is deeply conversant with books. He is a man of the
world and a scholar; but the scholar gives the tone to all his other
acquirements and pursuits. Sir James is by education and habit, and we
were going to add, by the original turn of his mind, a college-man; and
perhaps he would have passed his time most happily and respectably, had
he devoted himself entirely to that kind of life. The strength of his
faculties would have been best developed, his ambition would have met
its proudest reward, in the accumulation and elaborate display of grave
and useful knowledge. As it is, it may be said, that in company he talks
well, but too much; that in writing he overlays the original subject and
spirit of the composition, by an appeal to authorities and by too formal
a method; that in public speaking the logician takes place of the
orator, and that he fails to give effect to a particular point or to
urge an immediate advantage home upon his adversary from the enlarged
scope of his mind, and the wide career he takes in the field of
argument.

To consider him in the last point of view, first. As a political
partisan, he is rather the lecturer than the advocate. He is able to
instruct and delight an impartial and disinterested audience by the
extent of his information, by his acquaintance with general principles,
by the clearness and aptitude of his illustrations, by vigour and
copiousness of style; but where he has a prejudiced or unfair antagonist
to contend with, he is just as likely to put weapons into his enemy's
hands as to wrest them from him, and his object seems to be rather to
deserve than to obtain success. The characteristics of his mind are
retentiveness and comprehension, with facility of production: but he is
not equally remarkable for originality of view, or warmth of feeling, or
liveliness of fancy. His eloquence is a little rhetorical; his reasoning
chiefly logical: he can bring down the account of knowledge on a vast
variety of subjects to the present moment, he can embellish any cause he
undertakes by the most approved and graceful ornaments, he can support
it by a host of facts and examples, but he cannot advance it a step
forward by placing it on a new and triumphant 'vantage-ground, nor
can he overwhelm and break down the artificial fences and bulwarks
of sophistry by the irresistible tide of manly enthusiasm. Sir James
Mackintosh is an accomplished debater, rather than a powerful orator: he
is distinguished more as a man of wonderful and variable talent than
as a man of commanding intellect. His mode of treating a question is
critical, and not parliamentary. It has been formed in the closet and
the schools, and is hardly fitted for scenes of active life, or the
collisions of party-spirit. Sir James reasons on the square; while the
arguments of his opponents are loaded with iron or gold. He makes,
indeed, a respectable ally, but not a very formidable opponent. He is as
likely, however, to prevail on a neutral, as he is almost certain to be
baffled on a hotly contested ground. On any question of general
policy or legislative improvement, the Member for Nairn is heard with
advantage, and his speeches are attended with effect: and he would have
equal weight and influence at other times, if it were the object of the
House to hear reason, as it is his aim to speak it. But on subjects of
peace or war, of political rights or foreign interference, where the
waves of party run high, and the liberty of nations or the fate of
mankind hangs trembling in the scales, though he probably displays equal
talent, and does full and heaped justice to the question (abstractedly
speaking, or if it were to be tried before an impartial assembly), yet
we confess we have seldom heard him, on such occasions, without pain for
the event. He did not slur his own character and pretensions, but he
compromised the argument. He spoke _the truth, the whole truth, and
nothing but the truth_; but the House of Commons (we dare aver it) is
not the place where the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the
truth can be spoken with safety or with advantage. The judgment of the
House is not a balance to weigh scruples and reasons to the turn of a
fraction: another element, besides the love of truth, enters into the
composition of their decisions, the reaction of which must be calculated
upon and guarded against. If our philosophical statesman had to open the
case before a class of tyros, or a circle of grey-beards, who wished to
form or to strengthen their judgments upon fair and rational grounds,
nothing could be more satisfactory, more luminous, more able or more
decisive than the view taken of it by Sir James Mackintosh. But the
House of Commons, as a collective body, have not the docility of youth,
the calm wisdom of age; and often only want an excuse to do wrong, or
to adhere to what they have already determined upon; and Sir James,
in detailing the inexhaustible stores of his memory and reading, in
unfolding the wide range of his theory and practice, in laying down
the rules and the exceptions, in insisting upon the advantages and the
objections with equal explicitness, would be sure to let something drop
that a dextrous and watchful adversary would easily pick up and turn
against him, if this were found necessary; or if with so many _pros_ and
_cons_, doubts and difficulties, dilemmas and alternatives thrown into
it, the scale, with its natural bias to interest and power, did not
already fly up and kick the beam. There wanted unity of purpose,
impetuosity of feeling to break through the phalanx of hostile and
inveterate prejudice arrayed against him. He gave a handle to his
enemies; threw stumbling-blocks in the way of his friends. He raised so
many objections for the sake of answering them, proposed so many doubts
for the sake of solving them, and made so many concessions where none
were demanded, that his reasoning had the effect of neutralizing itself;
it became a mere exercise of the understanding without zest or spirit
left in it; and the provident engineer who was to shatter in pieces
the strong-holds of corruption and oppression, by a well-directed and
unsparing discharge of artillery, seemed to have brought not only his
own cannon-balls, but his own wool-packs along with him to ward off
the threatened mischief. This was a good deal the effect of his maiden
speech on the transfer of Genoa, to which Lord Castlereagh did not deign
an answer, and which another Honourable Member called "a _finical_
speech. " It was a most able, candid, closely argued, and philosophical
exposure of that unprincipled transaction; but for this very reason it
was a solecism in the place where it was delivered. Sir James has, since
this period, and with the help of practice, lowered himself to the tone
of the House; and has also applied himself to questions more congenial
to his habits of mind, and where the success would be more likely to be
proportioned to his zeal and his exertions.

There was a greater degree of power, or of dashing and splendid effect
(we wish we could add, an equally humane and liberal spirit) in the
_Lectures on the Law of Nature and Nations_, formerly delivered by Sir
James (then Mr. ) Mackintosh, in Lincoln's-Inn Hall. He shewed greater
confidence; was more at home there. The effect was more electrical and
instantaneous, and this elicited a prouder display of intellectual
riches, and a more animated and imposing mode of delivery. He grew
wanton with success. Dazzling others by the brilliancy of his
acquirements, dazzled himself by the admiration they excited, he lost
fear as well as prudence; dared every thing, carried every thing before
him. The Modern Philosophy, counterscarp, outworks, citadel, and all,
fell without a blow, by "the whiff and wind of his fell _doctrine_," as
if it had been a pack of cards. The volcano of the French Revolution
was seen expiring in its own flames, like a bon-fire made of straw: the
principles of Reform were scattered in all directions, like chaff before
the keen northern blast. He laid about him like one inspired; nothing
could withstand his envenomed tooth. Like some savage beast got into
the garden of the fabled Hesperides, he made clear work of it, root and
branch, with white, foaming tusks--

"Laid waste the borders, and o'erthrew the bowers. "

The havoc was amazing, the desolation was complete. As to our visionary
sceptics and Utopian philosophers, they stood no chance with our
lecturer--he did not "carve them as a dish fit for the Gods, but hewed
them as a carcase fit for hounds. " Poor Godwin, who had come, in the
_bonhommie_ and candour of his nature, to hear what new light had broken
in upon his old friend, was obliged to quit the field, and slunk away
after an exulting taunt thrown out at "such fanciful chimeras as a
golden mountain or a perfect man. " Mr. Mackintosh had something of the
air, much of the dexterity and self-possession, of a political and
philosophical juggler; and an eager and admiring audience gaped and
greedily swallowed the gilded bait of sophistry, prepared for their
credulity and wonder. Those of us who attended day after day, and were
accustomed to have all our previous notions confounded and struck out of
our hands by some metaphysical legerdemain, were at last at some loss to
know _whether two and two made four_, till we had heard the lecturer's
opinion on that head. He might have some mental reservation on the
subject, some pointed ridicule to pour upon the common supposition,
some learned authority to quote against it. To anticipate the line of
argument he might pursue, was evidently presumptuous and premature. One
thing only appeared certain, that whatever opinion he chose to take up,
he was able to make good either by the foils or the cudgels, by gross
banter or nice distinctions, by a well-timed mixture of paradox and
common-place, by an appeal to vulgar prejudices or startling scepticism.
It seemed to be equally his object, or the tendency of his Discourses,
to unsettle every principle of reason or of common sense, and to leave
his audience at the mercy of the _dictum_ of a lawyer, the nod of a
minister, or the shout of a mob. To effect this purpose, he drew largely
on the learning of antiquity, on modern literature, on history, poetry,
and the belles-lettres, on the Schoolmen and on writers of novels,
French, English, and Italian. In mixing up the sparkling julep, that
by its potent operation was to scour away the dregs and feculence and
peccant humours of the body politic, he seemed to stand with his back
to the drawers in a metaphysical dispensary, and to take out of them
whatever ingredients suited his purpose. In this way he had an antidote
for every error, an answer to every folly. The writings of Burke, Hume,
Berkeley, Paley, Lord Bacon, Jeremy Taylor, Grotius, Puffendorf, Cicero,
Aristotle, Tacitus, Livy, Sully, Machiavel, Guicciardini, Thuanus, lay
open beside him, and he could instantly lay his hand upon the passage,
and quote them chapter and verse to the clearing up of all difficulties,
and the silencing of all oppugners. Mr. Mackintosh's Lectures were after
all but a kind of philosophical centos. They were profound, brilliant,
new to his hearers; but the profundity, the brilliancy, the novelty were
not his own. He was like Dr. Pangloss (not Voltaire's, but Coleman's)
who speaks only in quotations; and the pith, the marrow of Sir James's
reasoning and rhetoric at that memorable period might be put within
inverted commas. It, however, served its purpose and the loud echo died
away. We remember an excellent man and a sound critic[A] going to hear
one of these elaborate effusions; and on his want of enthusiasm being
accounted for from its not being one of the orator's brilliant days, he
replied, "he did not think a man of genius could speak for two hours
without saying something by which he would have been electrified. "
We are only sorry, at this distance of time, for one thing in these
Lectures--the tone and spirit in which they seemed to have been composed
and to be delivered. If all that body of opinions and principles of
which the orator read his recantation was unfounded, and there was an
end of all those views and hopes that pointed to future improvement, it
was not a matter of triumph or exultation to the lecturer or any body
else, to the young or the old, the wise or the foolish; on the contrary,
it was a subject of regret, of slow, reluctant, painful admission--

"Of lamentation loud heard through the rueful air. "

The immediate occasion of this sudden and violent change in Sir James's
views and opinions was attributed to a personal interview which he
had had a little before his death with Mr. Burke, at his house at
Beaconsfield. In the latter end of the year 1796, appeared the _Regicide
Peace_, from the pen of the great apostate from liberty and betrayer of
his species into the hands of those who claimed it as their property
by divine right--a work imposing, solid in many respects, abounding in
facts and admirable reasoning, and in which all flashy ornaments were
laid aside for a testamentary gravity, (the eloquence of despair
resembling the throes and heaving and muttered threats of an earthquake,
rather than the loud thunder-bolt)--and soon after came out a criticism
on it in _The Monthly Review_, doing justice to the author and the
style, and combating the inferences with force and at much length; but
with candour and with respect, amounting to deference. It was new to Mr.
Burke not to be called names by persons of the opposite party; it was
an additional triumph to him to be spoken well of, to be loaded with
well-earned praise by the author of the _Vindiciæ Gallicæ_. It was a
testimony from an old, a powerful, and an admired antagonist. [B] He sent
an invitation to the writer to come and see him; and in the course of
three days' animated discussion of such subjects, Mr. Mackintosh became
a convert not merely to the graces and gravity of Mr. Burke's style, but
to the liberality of his views, and the solidity of his opinions. --The
Lincoln's-Inn Lectures were the fruit of this interview: such is the
influence exercised by men of genius and imaginative power over those
who have nothing to oppose to their unforeseen flashes of thought and
invention, but the dry, cold, formal deductions of the understanding.
Our politician had time, during a few years of absence from his native
country, and while the din of war and the cries of party-spirit "were
lost over a wide and unhearing ocean," to recover from his surprise and
from a temporary alienation of mind; and to return in spirit, and in the
mild and mellowed maturity of age, to the principles and attachments of
his early life.

The appointment of Sir James Mackintosh to a Judgeship in India was one,
which, however flattering to his vanity or favourable to his interests,
was entirely foreign to his feelings and habits. It was an honourable
exile. He was out of his element among black slaves and sepoys, and
Nabobs and cadets, and writers to India. He had no one to exchange ideas
with. The "unbought grace of life," the charm of literary conversation
was gone. It was the habit of his mind, his ruling passion to enter into
the shock and conflict of opinions on philosophical, political, and
critical questions--not to dictate to raw tyros or domineer over persons
in subordinate situations--but to obtain the guerdon and the laurels of
superior sense and information by meeting with men of equal standing, to
have a fair field pitched, to argue, to distinguish, to reply, to
hunt down the game of intellect with eagerness and skill, to push an
advantage, to cover a retreat, to give and take a fall--

"And gladly would he learn, and gladly teach. "

It is no wonder that this sort of friendly intellectual gladiatorship is
Sir James's greatest pleasure, for it is his peculiar _forte_. He has
not many equals, and scarcely any superior in it. He is too indolent for
an author; too unimpassioned for an orator: but in society he is just
vain enough to be pleased with immediate attention, good-humoured
enough to listen with patience to others, with great coolness and
self-possession, fluent, communicative, and with a manner equally free
from violence and insipidity. Few subjects can be started, on which he
is not qualified to appear to advantage as the gentleman and scholar. If
there is some tinge of pedantry, it is carried off by great affability
of address and variety of amusing and interesting topics. There is
scarce an author that he has not read; a period of history that he is
not conversant with; a celebrated name of which he has not a number of
anecdotes to relate; an intricate question that he is not prepared
to enter upon in a popular or scientific manner. If an opinion in an
abstruse metaphysical author is referred to, he is probably able to
repeat the passage by heart, can tell the side of the page on which it
is to be met with, can trace it back through various descents to Locke,
Hobbes, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, to a place in some obscure folio of
the School-men or a note in one of the commentators on Aristotle or
Plato, and thus give you in a few moments' space, and without any effort
or previous notice, a chronological table of the progress of the human
mind in that particular branch of inquiry. There is something, we think,
perfectly admirable and delightful in an exhibition of this kind, and
which is equally creditable to the speaker and gratifying to the hearer.
But this kind of talent was of no use in India: the intellectual wares,
of which the Chief Judge delighted to make a display, were in no request
there. He languished after the friends and the society he had left
behind; and wrote over incessantly for books from England. One that was
sent him at this time was an _Essay on the Principles of Human Action_;
and the way in which he spoke of that dry, tough, metaphysical
_choke-pear_, shewed the dearth of intellectual intercourse in which he
lived, and the craving in his mind after those studies which had once
been his pride, and to which he still turned for consolation in his
remote solitude. --Perhaps to another, the novelty of the scene, the
differences of mind and manners might have atoned for a want of social
and literary _agrèmens_: but Sir James is one of those who see nature
through the spectacles of books. He might like to read an account of
India; but India itself with its burning, shining face would be a mere
blank, an endless waste to him. To persons of this class of mind things
must be translated into words, visible images into abstract propositions
to meet their refined apprehensions, and they have no more to say to a
matter-of-fact staring them in the face without a label in its mouth,
than they would to a hippopotamus! --We may add, before we quit this
point, that we cannot conceive of any two persons more different in
colloquial talents, in which they both excel, than Sir James Mackintosh
and Mr. Coleridge. They have nearly an equal range of reading and of
topics of conversation: but in the mind of the one we see nothing but
_fixtures_, in the other every thing is fluid. The ideas of the one
are as formal and tangible, as those of the other are shadowy and
evanescent. Sir James Mackintosh walks over the ground, Mr. Coleridge is
always flying off from it. The first knows all that has been said upon
a subject; the last has something to say that was never said before. If
the one deals too much in learned _common-places_, the other teems with
idle fancies. The one has a good deal of the _caput mortuum_ of genius,
the other is all volatile salt. The conversation of Sir James Mackintosh
has the effect of reading a well-written book, that of his friend
is like hearing a bewildered dream. The one is an Encyclopedia of
knowledge, the other is a succession of _Sybilline Leaves_!

As an author, Sir James Mackintosh may claim the foremost rank among
those who pride themselves on artificial ornaments and acquired
learning, or who write what may be termed a _composite_ style. His
_Vindciae Gallicae_ is a work of great labour, great ingenuity, great
brilliancy, and great vigour. It is a little too antithetical in the
structure of its periods, too dogmatical in the announcement of its
opinions. Sir James has, we believe, rejected something of the
_false brilliant_ of the one, as he has retracted some of the abrupt
extravagance of the other. We apprehend, however, that our author is not
one of those who draw from their own resources and accumulated feelings,
or who improve with age. He belongs to a class (common in Scotland
and elsewhere) who get up school-exercises on any given subject in
a masterly manner at twenty, and who at forty are either where they
were--or retrograde, if they are men of sense and modesty. The reason
is, their vanity is weaned, after the first hey-day and animal spirits
of youth are flown, from making an affected display of knowledge, which,
however useful, is not their own, and may be much more simply stated;
they are tired of repeating the same arguments over and over again,
after having exhausted and rung the changes on their whole stock for a
number of times. Sir James Mackintosh is understood to be a writer in
the Edinburgh Review; and the articles attributed to him there are full
of matter of great pith and moment. But they want the trim, pointed
expression, the ambitious ornaments, the ostentatious display and rapid
volubility of his early productions. We have heard it objected to his
later compositions, that his style is good as far as single words and
phrases are concerned, but that his sentences are clumsy and disjointed,
and that these make up still more awkward and sprawling paragraphs. This
is a nice criticism, and we cannot speak to its truth: but if the fact
be so, we think we can account for it from the texture and obvious
process of the author's mind. All his ideas may be said to be given
preconceptions. They do not arise, as it were, out of the subject, or
out of one another at the moment, and therefore do not flow naturally
and gracefully from one another. They have been laid down beforehand in
a sort of formal division or frame-work of the understanding; and the
connexion between the premises and the conclusion, between one branch
of a subject and another, is made out in a bungling and unsatisfactory
manner. There is no principle of fusion in the work: he strikes after
the iron is cold, and there is a want of malleability in the style. Sir
James is at present said to be engaged in writing a _History of England_
after the downfall of the house of Stuart. May it be worthy of the
talents of the author, and of the principles of the period it is
intended to illustrate!


[Footnote A: The late Rev. Joseph Fawcett, of Walthamstow. ]

[Footnote B: At the time when the _Vindiciae Gallicae_ first made its
appearance, as a reply to the _Reflections on the French Revolution_, it
was cried up by the partisans of the new school, as a work superior in
the charms of composition to its redoubted rival: in acuteness, depth,
and soundness of reasoning, of course there was supposed to be no
comparison. ]





* * * * *





MR. WORDSWORTH.



Mr. Wordsworth's genius is a pure emanation of the Spirit of the Age.
Had he lived in any other period of the world, he would never have been
heard of. As it is, he has some difficulty to contend with the hebetude
of his intellect, and the meanness of his subject. With him "lowliness
is young ambition's ladder:" but he finds it a toil to climb in this way
the steep of Fame. His homely Muse can hardly raise her wing from the
ground, nor spread her hidden glories to the sun. He has "no figures nor
no fantasies, which busy _passion_ draws in the brains of men:" neither
the gorgeous machinery of mythologic lore, nor the splendid colours of
poetic diction. His style is vernacular: he delivers household truths.
He sees nothing loftier than human hopes; nothing deeper than the human
heart. This he probes, this he tampers with, this he poises, with all
its incalculable weight of thought and feeling, in his hands; and at the
same time calms the throbbing pulses of his own heart, by keeping his
eye ever fixed on the face of nature.
If he can make the life-blood flow
from the wounded breast, this is the living colouring with which he
paints his verse: if he can assuage the pain or close up the wound with
the balm of solitary musing, or the healing power of plants and herbs
and "skyey influences," this is the sole triumph of his art. He takes
the simplest elements of nature and of the human mind, the mere abstract
conditions inseparable from our being, and tries to compound a new
system of poetry from them; and has perhaps succeeded as well as any one
could. "_Nihil humani a me alienum puto_"--is the motto of his works. He
thinks nothing low or indifferent of which this can be affirmed: every
thing that professes to be more than this, that is not an absolute
essence of truth and feeling, he holds to be vitiated, false, and
spurious. In a word, his poetry is founded on setting up an opposition
(and pushing it to the utmost length) between the natural and the
artificial: between the spirit of humanity, and the spirit of fashion
and of the world!

It is one of the innovations of the time. It partakes of, and is carried
along with, the revolutionary movement of our age: the political changes
of the day were the model on which he formed and conducted his poetical
experiments. His Muse (it cannot be denied, and without this we cannot
explain its character at all) is a levelling one. It proceeds on a
principle of equality, and strives to reduce all things to the same
standard. It is distinguished by a proud humility. It relies upon its
own resources, and disdains external shew and relief. It takes the
commonest events and objects, as a test to prove that nature is always
interesting from its inherent truth and beauty, without any of the
ornaments of dress or pomp of circumstances to set it off. Hence the
unaccountable mixture of seeming simplicity and real abstruseness in the
_Lyrical Ballads_. Fools have laughed at, wise men scarcely understand
them. He takes a subject or a story merely as pegs or loops to hang
thought and feeling on; the incidents are trifling, in proportion to
his contempt for imposing appearances; the reflections are profound,
according to the gravity and the aspiring pretensions of his mind. His
popular, inartificial style gets rid (at a blow) of all the trappings
of verse, of all the high places of poetry: "the cloud-capt towers, the
solemn temples, the gorgeous palaces," are swept to the ground, and
"like the baseless fabric of a vision, leave not a wreck behind. "
All the traditions of learning, all the superstitions of age, are
obliterated and effaced. We begin _de novo_, on a _tabula rasa_ of
poetry. The purple pall, the nodding plume of tragedy are exploded as
mere pantomime and trick, to return to the simplicity of truth and
nature. Kings, queens, priests, nobles, the altar and the throne, the
distinctions of rank, birth, wealth, power, "the judge's robe, the
marshall's truncheon, the ceremony that to great ones 'longs," are not
to be found here. The author tramples on the pride of art with greater
pride. The Ode and Epode, the Strophe and the Antistrophe, he laughs to
scorn. The harp of Homer, the trump of Pindar and of Alcaeus are still.
The decencies of costume, the decorations of vanity are stripped off
without mercy as barbarous, idle, and Gothic. The jewels in the crisped
hair, the diadem on the polished brow are thought meretricious,
theatrical, vulgar; and nothing contents his fastidious taste beyond
a simple garland of flowers. Neither does he avail himself of the
advantages which nature or accident holds out to him. He chooses to have
his subject a foil to his invention, to owe nothing but to himself. He
gathers manna in the wilderness, he strikes the barren rock for the
gushing moisture. He elevates the mean by the strength of his own
aspirations; he clothes the naked with beauty and grandeur from the
store of his own recollections. No cypress-grove loads his verse with
perfumes: but his imagination lends a sense of joy

"To the bare trees and mountains bare,
And grass in the green field. "

No storm, no shipwreck startles us by its horrors: but the rainbow lifts
its head in the cloud, and the breeze sighs through the withered fern.
No sad vicissitude of fate, no overwhelming catastrophe in nature
deforms his page: but the dew-drop glitters on the bending flower, the
tear collects in the glistening eye.

"Beneath the hills, along the flowery vales,
The generations are prepared; the pangs,
The internal pangs are ready; the dread strife
Of poor humanity's afflicted will,
Struggling in vain with ruthless destiny. "

As the lark ascends from its low bed on fluttering wing, and salutes the
morning skies; so Mr. Wordsworth's unpretending Muse, in russet guise,
scales the summits of reflection, while it makes the round earth its
footstool, and its home!

Possibly a good deal of this may be regarded as the effect of
disappointed views and an inverted ambition. Prevented by native pride
and indolence from climbing the ascent of learning or greatness, taught
by political opinions to say to the vain pomp and glory of the world, "I
hate ye," seeing the path of classical and artificial poetry blocked up
by the cumbrous ornaments of style and turgid _common-places_, so
that nothing more could be achieved in that direction but by the most
ridiculous bombast or the tamest servility; he has turned back partly
from the bias of his mind, partly perhaps from a judicious policy--has
struck into the sequestered vale of humble life, sought out the Muse
among sheep-cotes and hamlets and the peasant's mountain-haunts, has
discarded all the tinsel pageantry of verse, and endeavoured (not in
vain) to aggrandise the trivial and add the charm of novelty to the
familiar. No one has shewn the same imagination in raising trifles into
importance: no one has displayed the same pathos in treating of the
simplest feelings of the heart. Reserved, yet haughty, having no unruly
or violent passions, (or those passions having been early suppressed,)
Mr. Wordsworth has passed his life in solitary musing, or in daily
converse with the face of nature. He exemplifies in an eminent degree
the power of _association_; for his poetry has no other source or
character. He has dwelt among pastoral scenes, till each object has
become connected with a thousand feelings, a link in the chain of
thought, a fibre of his own heart. Every one is by habit and familiarity
strongly attached to the place of his birth, or to objects that recal
the most pleasing and eventful circumstances of his life. But to the
author of the _Lyrical Ballads_, nature is a kind of home; and he may be
said to take a personal interest in the universe. There is no image so
insignificant that it has not in some mood or other found the way into
his heart: no sound that does not awaken the memory of other years. --

"To him the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears. "

The daisy looks up to him with sparkling eye as an old acquaintance:
the cuckoo haunts him with sounds of early youth not to be expressed: a
linnet's nest startles him with boyish delight: an old withered thorn is
weighed down with a heap of recollections: a grey cloak, seen on some
wild moor, torn by the wind, or drenched in the rain, afterwards becomes
an object of imagination to him: even the lichens on the rock have a
life and being in his thoughts. He has described all these objects in a
way and with an intensity of feeling that no one else had done before
him, and has given a new view or aspect of nature. He is in this sense
the most original poet now living, and the one whose writings could the
least be spared: for they have no substitute elsewhere. The vulgar do
not read them, the learned, who see all things through books, do not
understand them, the great despise, the fashionable may ridicule them:
but the author has created himself an interest in the heart of the
retired and lonely student of nature, which can never die. Persons
of this class will still continue to feel what he has felt: he has
expressed what they might in vain wish to express, except with
glistening eye and faultering tongue! There is a lofty philosophic tone,
a thoughtful humanity, infused into his pastoral vein. Remote from the
passions and events of the great world, he has communicated interest and
dignity to the primal movements of the heart of man, and ingrafted his
own conscious reflections on the casual thoughts of hinds and shepherds.
Nursed amidst the grandeur of mountain scenery, he has stooped to have
a nearer view of the daisy under his feet, or plucked a branch of
white-thorn from the spray: but in describing it, his mind seems imbued
with the majesty and solemnity of the objects around him--the tall rock
lifts its head in the erectness of his spirit; the cataract roars in the
sound of his verse; and in its dim and mysterious meaning, the mists
seem to gather in the hollows of Helvellyn, and the forked Skiddaw
hovers in the distance. There is little mention of mountainous scenery
in Mr. Wordsworth's poetry; but by internal evidence one might be almost
sure that it was written in a mountainous country, from its bareness,
its simplicity, its loftiness and its depth!

His later philosophic productions have a somewhat different character.
They are a departure from, a dereliction of his first principles. They
are classical and courtly. They are polished in style, without being
gaudy; dignified in subject, without affectation. They seem to have
been composed not in a cottage at Grasmere, but among the half-inspired
groves and stately recollections of Cole-Orton. We might allude in
particular, for examples of what we mean, to the lines on a Picture by
Claude Lorraine, and to the exquisite poem, entitled _Laodamia_. The
last of these breathes the pure spirit of the finest fragments of
antiquity--the sweetness, the gravity, the strength, the beauty and the
langour of death--

"Calm contemplation and majestic pains. "

Its glossy brilliancy arises from the perfection of the finishing, like
that of careful sculpture, not from gaudy colouring--the texture of the
thoughts has the smoothness and solidity of marble. It is a poem that
might be read aloud in Elysium, and the spirits of departed heroes and
sages would gather round to listen to it! Mr. Wordsworth's philosophic
poetry, with a less glowing aspect and less tumult in the veins than
Lord Byron's on similar occasions, bends a calmer and keener eye
on mortality; the impression, if less vivid, is more pleasing and
permanent; and we confess it (perhaps it is a want of taste and proper
feeling) that there are lines and poems of our author's, that we think
of ten times for once that we recur to any of Lord Byron's. Or if there
are any of the latter's writings, that we can dwell upon in the same
way, that is, as lasting and heart-felt sentiments, it is when laying
aside his usual pomp and pretension, he descends with Mr. Wordsworth to
the common ground of a disinterested humanity. It may be considered
as characteristic of our poet's writings, that they either make no
impression on the mind at all, seem mere _nonsense-verses_, or that they
leave a mark behind them that never wears out. They either

"Fall blunted from the indurated breast"--

without any perceptible result, or they absorb it like a passion. To
one class of readers he appears sublime, to another (and we fear the
largest) ridiculous. He has probably realised Milton's wish,--"and fit
audience found, though few:" but we suspect he is not reconciled to the
alternative. There are delightful passages in the EXCURSION, both of
natural description and of inspired reflection (passages of the latter
kind that in the sound of the thoughts and of the swelling language
resemble heavenly symphonies, mournful _requiems_ over the grave of
human hopes); but we must add, in justice and in sincerity, that we
think it impossible that this work should ever become popular, even in
the same degree as the _Lyrical Ballads_. It affects a system without
having any intelligible clue to one; and instead of unfolding a
principle in various and striking lights, repeats the same conclusions
till they become flat and insipid. Mr. Wordsworth's mind is obtuse,
except as it is the organ and the receptacle of accumulated feelings:
it is not analytic, but synthetic; it is reflecting, rather than
theoretical. The EXCURSION, we believe, fell stillborn from the press.
There was something abortive, and clumsy, and ill-judged in the attempt.
It was long and laboured. The personages, for the most part, were low,
the fare rustic: the plan raised expectations which were not fulfilled,
and the effect was like being ushered into a stately hall and invited
to sit down to a splendid banquet in the company of clowns, and with
nothing but successive courses of apple-dumplings served up. It was not
even _toujours perdrix_!

Mr. Wordsworth, in his person, is above the middle size, with marked
features, and an air somewhat stately and Quixotic. He reminds one of
some of Holbein's heads, grave, saturnine, with a slight indication of
sly humour, kept under by the manners of the age or by the pretensions
of the person. He has a peculiar sweetness in his smile, and great depth
and manliness and a rugged harmony, in the tones of his voice. His
manner of reading his own poetry is particularly imposing; and in his
favourite passages his eye beams with preternatural lustre, and the
meaning labours slowly up from his swelling breast. No one who has seen
him at these moments could go away with an impression that he was a "man
of no mark or likelihood. " Perhaps the comment of his face and voice is
necessary to convey a full idea of his poetry. His language may not be
intelligible, but his manner is not to be mistaken. It is clear that
he is either mad or inspired. In company, even in a _tête-à-tête_, Mr.
Wordsworth is often silent, indolent, and reserved. If he is become
verbose and oracular of late years, he was not so in his better days.
He threw out a bold or an indifferent remark without either effort or
pretension, and relapsed into musing again. He shone most (because he
seemed most roused and animated) in reciting his own poetry, or in
talking about it. He sometimes gave striking views of his feelings and
trains of association in composing certain passages; or if one did
not always understand his distinctions, still there was no want of
interest--there was a latent meaning worth inquiring into, like a vein
of ore that one Cannot exactly hit upon at the moment, but of which
there are sure indications. His standard of poetry is high and severe,
almost to exclusiveness. He admits of nothing below, scarcely of any
thing above himself. It is fine to hear him talk of the way in which
certain subjects should have been treated by eminent poets, according to
his notions of the art. Thus he finds fault with Dryden's description of
Bacchus in the _Alexander's Feast_, as if he were a mere good-looking
youth, or boon companion--

"Flushed with a purple grace,
He shews his honest face"--

instead of representing the God returning from the conquest of India,
crowned with vine-leaves, and drawn by panthers, and followed by troops
of satyrs, of wild men and animals that he had tamed. You would thank,
in hearing him speak on this subject, that you saw Titian's picture of
the meeting of _Bacchus and Ariadne_--so classic were his conceptions,
so glowing his style. Milton is his great idol, and he sometimes dares
to compare himself with him. His Sonnets, indeed, have something of the
same high-raised tone and prophetic spirit. Chaucer is another prime
favourite of his, and he has been at the pains to modernise some of the
Canterbury Tales. Those persons who look upon Mr. Wordsworth as a merely
puerile writer, must be rather at a loss to account for his strong
predilection for such geniuses as Dante and Michael Angelo. We do not
think our author has any very cordial sympathy with Shakespear. How
should he? Shakespear was the least of an egotist of any body in the
world. He does not much relish the variety and scope of dramatic
composition. "He hates those interlocutions between Lucius and Caius. "
Yet Mr. Wordsworth himself wrote a tragedy when he was young; and we
have heard the following energetic lines quoted from it, as put into the
mouth of a person smit with remorse for some rash crime:

----"Action is momentary,
The motion of a muscle this way or that;
Suffering is long, obscure, and infinite! "

Perhaps for want of light and shade, and the unshackled spirit of the
drama, this performance was never brought forward. Our critic has a
great dislike to Gray, and a fondness for Thomson and Collins. It is
mortifying to hear him speak of Pope and Dryden, whom, because they have
been supposed to have all the possible excellences of poetry, he will
allow to have none. Nothing, however, can be fairer, or more amusing,
than the way in which he sometimes exposes the unmeaning verbiage of
modern poetry. Thus, in the beginning of Dr. Johnson's _Vanity of Human
Wishes_--

"Let observation with extensive view
Survey mankind from China to Peru"--

he says there is a total want of imagination accompanying the words,
the same idea is repeated three times under the disguise of a different
phraseology: it comes to this--"let _observation_, with extensive
_observation, observe_ mankind;" or take away the first line, and the
second,

"Survey mankind from China to Peru,"

literally conveys the whole. Mr. Wordsworth is, we must say, a perfect
Drawcansir as to prose writers. He complains of the dry reasoners and
matter-of-fact people for their want of _passion_; and he is jealous of
the rhetorical declaimers and rhapsodists as trenching on the province
of poetry. He condemns all French writers (as well of poetry as prose)
in the lump. His list in this way is indeed small. He approves of
Walton's Angler, Paley, and some other writers of an inoffensive modesty
of pretension. He also likes books of voyages and travels, and Robinson
Crusoe. In art, he greatly esteems Bewick's wood-cuts, and Waterloo's
sylvan etchings. But he sometimes takes a higher tone, and gives his
mind fair play. We have known him enlarge with a noble intelligence and
enthusiasm on Nicolas Poussin's fine landscape-compositions, pointing
out the unity of design that pervades them, the superintending mind,
the imaginative principle that brings all to bear on the same end;
and declaring he would not give a rush for any landscape that did not
express the time of day, the climate, the period of the world it was
meant to illustrate, or had not this character of _wholeness_ in it. His
eye also does justice to Rembrandt's fine and masterly effects. In the
way in which that artist works something out of nothing, and transforms
the stump of a tree, a common figure into an _ideal_ object, by the
gorgeous light and shade thrown upon it, he perceives an analogy to his
own mode of investing the minute details of nature with an atmosphere
of sentiment; and in pronouncing Rembrandt to be a man of genius, feels
that he strengthens his own claim to the title. It has been said of
Mr. Wordsworth, that "he hates conchology, that he hates the Venus of
Medicis. " But these, we hope, are mere epigrams and _jeux-d'esprit_, as
far from truth as they are free from malice; a sort of running satire or
critical clenches--

"Where one for sense and one for rhyme
Is quite sufficient at one time. "

We think, however, that if Mr. Wordsworth had been a more liberal and
candid critic, he would have been a more sterling writer. If a greater
number of sources of pleasure had been open to him, he would have
communicated pleasure to the world more frequently. Had he been less
fastidious in pronouncing sentence on the works of others, his own would
have been received more favourably, and treated more leniently.
The current of his feelings is deep, but narrow; the range of his
understanding is lofty and aspiring rather than discursive. The force,
the originality, the absolute truth and identity with which he feels
some things, makes him indifferent to so many others. The simplicity and
enthusiasm of his feelings, with respect to nature, renders him bigotted
and intolerant in his judgments of men and things. But it happens to
him, as to others, that his strength lies in his weakness; and perhaps
we have no right to complain. We might get rid of the cynic and the
egotist, and find in his stead a common-place man. We should "take the
good the Gods provide us:" a fine and original vein of poetry is not
one of their most contemptible gifts, and the rest is scarcely worth
thinking of, except as it may be a mortification to those who expect
perfection from human nature; or who have been idle enough at some
period of their lives, to deify men of genius as possessing claims above
it. But this is a chord that jars, and we shall not dwell upon it.

Lord Byron we have called, according to the old proverb, "the spoiled
child of fortune:" Mr. Wordsworth might plead, in mitigation of some
peculiarities, that he is "the spoiled child of disappointment. " We are
convinced, if he had been early a popular poet, he would have borne his
honours meekly, and would have been a person of great _bonhommie_ and
frankness of disposition. But the sense of injustice and of undeserved
ridicule sours the temper and narrows the views. To have produced works
of genius, and to find them neglected or treated with scorn, is one of
the heaviest trials of human patience. We exaggerate our own merits when
they are denied by others, and are apt to grudge and cavil at every
particle of praise bestowed on those to whom we feel a conscious
superiority. In mere self-defence we turn against the world, when it
turns against us; brood over the undeserved slights we receive; and thus
the genial current of the soul is stopped, or vents itself in effusions
of petulance and self-conceit. Mr. Wordsworth has thought too much of
contemporary critics and criticism; and less than he ought of the award
of posterity, and of the opinion, we do not say of private friends, but
of those who were made so by their admiration of his genius. He did not
court popularity by a conformity to established models, and he ought
not to have been surprised that his originality was not understood as a
matter of course. He has _gnawed too much on the bridle_; and has often
thrown out crusts to the critics, in mere defiance or as a point of
honour when he was challenged, which otherwise his own good sense would
have withheld. We suspect that Mr. Wordsworth's feelings are a little
morbid in this respect, or that he resents censure more than he is
gratified by praise. Otherwise, the tide has turned much in his favour
of late years--he has a large body of determined partisans--and is at
present sufficiently in request with the public to save or relieve him
from the last necessity to which a man of genius can be reduced--that
of becoming the God of his own idolatry!





* * * * *





MR. MALTHUS.



Mr. Malthus may be considered as one of those rare and fortunate writers
who have attained a _scientific_ reputation in questions of moral and
political philosophy. His name undoubtedly stands very high in the
present age, and will in all probability go down to posterity with more
or less of renown or obloquy. It was said by a person well qualified
to judge both from strength and candour of mind, that "it would take
a thousand years at least to answer his work on Population. " He has
certainly thrown a new light on that question, and changed the aspect of
political economy in a decided and material point of view--whether he
has not also endeavoured to spread a gloom over the hopes and more
sanguine speculations of man, and to cast a slur upon the face of
nature, is another question. There is this to be said for Mr. Malthus,
that in speaking of him, one knows what one is talking about. He is
something beyond a mere name--one has not to _beat the bush_ about his
talents, his attainments, his vast reputation, and leave off without
knowing what it all amounts to--he is not one of those great men, who
set themselves off and strut and fret an hour upon the stage, during a
day-dream of popularity, with the ornaments and jewels borrowed from the
common stock, to which nothing but their vanity and presumption gives
them the least individual claim--he has dug into the mine of truth, and
brought up ore mixed with dross! In weighing his merits we come at once
to the question of what he has done or failed to do. It is a specific
claim that he sets up. When we speak of Mr. Malthus, we mean the _Essay
on Population_; and when we mention the Essay on Population, we mean
a distinct leading proposition, that stands out intelligibly from all
trashy pretence, and is a ground on which to fix the levers that may
move the world, backwards or forwards. He has not left opinion where
he found it; he has advanced or given it a wrong bias, or thrown a
stumbling-block in its way. In a word, his name is not stuck, like so
many others, in the firmament of reputation, nobody knows why, inscribed
in great letters, and with a transparency of TALENTS, GENIUS, LEARNING
blazing round it--it is tantamount to an idea, it is identified with
a principle, it means that _the population cannot go on perpetually
increasing without pressing on the limits of the means of subsistence,
and that a check of some kind or other must, sooner or later, be opposed
to it_. This is the essence of the doctrine which Mr. Malthus has been
the first to bring into general notice, and as we think, to establish
beyond the fear of contradiction. Admitting then as we do the prominence
and the value of his claims to public attention, it yet remains a
question, how far those claims are (as to the talent displayed in them)
strictly original; how far (as to the logical accuracy with which he has
treated the subject) he has introduced foreign and doubtful matter
into it; and how far (as to the spirit in which he has conducted his
inquiries, and applied a general principle to particular objects) he has
only drawn fair and inevitable conclusions from it, or endeavoured to
tamper with and wrest it to sinister and servile purposes. A writer who
shrinks from following up a well-founded principle into its untoward
consequences from timidity or false delicacy, is not worthy of the
name of a philosopher: a writer who assumes the garb of candour and an
inflexible love of truth to garble and pervert it, to crouch to power
and pander to prejudice, deserves a worse title than that of a sophist!

Mr. Malthus's first octavo volume on this subject (published in the year
1798) was intended as an answer to Mr. Godwin's _Enquiry concerning
Political Justice_. It was well got up for the purpose, and had an
immediate effect. It was what in the language of the ring is called _a
facer_. It made Mr. Godwin and the other advocates of Modern Philosophy
look about them. It may be almost doubted whether Mr. Malthus was in the
first instance serious in many things that he threw out, or whether he
did not hazard the whole as an amusing and extreme paradox, which might
puzzle the reader as it had done himself in an idle moment, but to which
no practical consequence whatever could attach. This state of mind would
probably continue till the irritation of enemies and the encouragement
of friends convinced him that what he had at first exhibited as an idle
fancy was in fact a very valuable discovery, or "like the toad ugly and
venomous, had yet a precious jewel in its head. " Such a supposition
would at least account for some things in the original Essay, which
scarcely any writer would venture upon, except as professed exercises of
ingenuity, and which have been since in part retracted. But a wrong
bias was thus given, and the author's theory was thus rendered warped,
disjointed, and sophistical from the very outset.

Nothing could in fact be more illogical (not to say absurd) than the
whole of Mr. Malthus's reasoning applied as an answer (_par excellence_)
to Mr. Godwin's book, or to the theories of other Utopian philosophers.
Mr. Godwin was not singular, but was kept in countenance by many
authorities, both ancient and modern, in supposing a state of society
possible in which the passions and wills of individuals would be
conformed to the general good, in which the knowledge of the best means
of promoting human welfare and the desire of contributing to it
would banish vice and misery from the world, and in which, the
stumbling-blocks of ignorance, of selfishness, and the indulgence of
gross appetite being removed, all things would move on by the mere
impulse of wisdom and virtue, to still higher and higher degrees of
perfection and happiness. Compared with the lamentable and gross
deficiencies of existing institutions, such a view of futurity as barely
possible could not fail to allure the gaze and tempt the aspiring
thoughts of the philanthropist and the philosopher: the hopes and the
imaginations of speculative men could not but rush forward into this
ideal world as into a _vacuum_ of good; and from "the mighty stream of
tendency" (as Mr. Wordsworth in the cant of the day calls it,) there was
danger that the proud monuments of time-hallowed institutions, that the
strong-holds of power and corruption, that "the Corinthian capitals of
polished society," with the base and pediments, might be overthrown
and swept away as by a hurricane. There were not wanting persons whose
ignorance, whose fears, whose pride, or whose prejudices contemplated
such an alternative with horror; and who would naturally feel no small
obligation to the man who should relieve their apprehensions from the
stunning roar of this mighty change of opinion that thundered at a
distance, and should be able, by some logical apparatus or unexpected
turn of the argument, to prevent the vessel of the state from being
hurried forward with the progress of improvement, and dashed in pieces
down the tremendous precipice of human perfectibility. Then comes Mr.