A LETTER TO WILLIAM GIFFORD, ESQ.
[The title-page of the original edition is as follows: A Letter to William Gifford, Esq. From William Hazlitt, Esq. ‘Fit pugil, et medicum urget.’ London: Printed for John Miller, Burlington Arcade, Piccadilly. 1819. Price Three Shillings. A so-called ‘second edition’ of 1820 consisted of the unsold copies with a fresh title-page: London: Printed for Robert Stodart, 81 Strand. 1820.]
A LETTER TO WILLIAM GIFFORD, ESQ.
Sir,—You have an ugly trick of saying what is not true of any one you do not like; and it will be the object of this letter to cure you of it. You say what you please of others: it is time you were told what you are. In doing this, give me leave to borrow the familiarity of your style:—for the fidelity of the picture I shall be answerable.
You are a little person, but a considerable cat’s-paw; and so far worthy of notice. Your clandestine connexion with persons high in office constantly influences your opinions, and alone gives importance to them. You are the Government Critic, a character nicely differing from that of a government spy—the invisible link, that connects literature with the police. It is your business to keep a strict eye over all writers who differ in opinion with his Majesty’s Ministers, and to measure their talents and attainments by the standard of their servility and meanness. For this office you are well qualified. Besides being the Editor of the Quarterly Review, you are also paymaster of the band of Gentlemen Pensioners; and when an author comes before you in the one capacity, with whom you are not acquainted in the other, you know how to deal with him. You have your cue beforehand. The distinction between truth and falsehood you make no account of: you mind only the distinction between Whig and Tory. Accustomed to the indulgence of your mercenary virulence and party-spite, you have lost all relish as well as capacity for the unperverted exercises of the understanding, and make up for the obvious want of ability by a bare-faced want of principle. The same set of thread-bare common-places, the same second-hand assortment of abusive nicknames, the same assumption of little magisterial airs of superiority, are regularly repeated; and the ready convenient lie comes in aid of the dearth of other resources, and passes off, with impunity, in the garb of religion and loyalty. If no one finds it out, why then there is no harm done, snug’s the word; or if it should be detected, it is a good joke, shews spirit and invention in proportion to its grossness and impudence, and it is only a pity that what was so well meant in so good a cause, should miscarry! The end sanctifies the means; and you keep no faith with heretics in religion or government. You are under the protection of the Court; and your zeal for your king and country entitles you to say what you chuse of every public writer who does not do all in his power to pamper the one into a tyrant, and to trample the other into a herd of slaves. You derive your weight with the great and powerful from the very circumstance that takes away all real weight from your authority, viz. that it is avowedly, and upon every occasion, exerted for no one purpose but to hold up to hatred and contempt whatever opposes in the slightest degree and in the most flagrant instances of abuse their pride and passions. You dictate your opinions to a party, because not one of your opinions is formed upon an honest conviction of the truth or justice of the case, but by collusion with the prejudices, caprice, interest or vanity of your employers. The mob of well-dressed readers who consult the Quarterly Review, know that there is no offence in it. They put faith in it because they are aware that it is ‘false and hollow, but will please the ear’; that it will tell them nothing but what they would wish to believe. Your reasoning comes under the head of Court-news; your taste is a standard of the prevailing ton in certain circles, like Ackerman’s dresses for May. When you damn an author, one knows that he is not a favourite at Carlton House. When you say that an author cannot write common sense or English, you mean that he does not believe in the doctrine of divine right. Of course, the clergy and gentry will not read such an author. Your praise or blame has nothing to do with the merits of a work, but with the party to which the writer belongs, or is in the inverse ratio of its merits. The dingy cover that wraps the pages of the Quarterly Review does not contain a concentrated essence of taste and knowledge, but is a receptacle for the scum and sediment of all the prejudice, bigotry, ill-will, ignorance, and rancour, afloat in the kingdom. This the fools and knaves who pin their faith on you know, and it is on this account they pin their faith on you. They come to you for a scale not of literary talent but of political subserviency. They want you to set your mark of approbation on a writer as a thorough-paced tool, or of reprobation as an honest man. Your fashionable readers, Sir, are hypocrites as well as knaves and fools; and the watch-word, the practical intelligence they want, must be conveyed to them without implied offence to their candour and liberality, in the patois and gibberish of fraud of which you are a master. When you begin to jabber about common sense and English, they know what to be at, shut up the book, and wonder that any respectable publisher can be found to let it lie on his counter, as much as if it were a Petition for Reform. Do you suppose, Sir, that such persons as the Rev. Gerard Valerian Wellesley and the Rev. Weeden Butler would not be glad to ruin what they call a Jacobin author as well as a Jacobin stationer?[[72]] Or that they will not thank you for persuading them that their doing so in the former case is a proof of their taste and good sense, as well as loyalty and religion? You know very well that if a particle of truth or fairness were to find its way into a single number of your publication, another Quarterly Review would be set up to-morrow for the express purpose of depriving every author, in prose or verse, of his reputation and livelihood, who is not a regular hack of the vilest cabal that ever disgraced this or any other country.
There is something in your nature and habits that fits you for the situation into which your good fortune has thrown you. In the first place, you are in no danger of exciting the jealousy of your patrons by a mortifying display of extraordinary talents, while your sordid devotion to their will and to your own interest at once ensures their gratitude and contempt. To crawl and lick the dust is all they expect of you, and all you can do. Otherwise they might fear your power, for they could have no dependence on your fidelity: but they take you with safety and fondness to their bosoms; for they know that if you cease to be a tool, you cease to be anything. If you had an exuberance of wit, the unguarded use of it might sometimes glance at your employers; if you were sincere yourself, you might respect the motives of others; if you had sufficient understanding, you might attempt an argument, and fail in it. But luckily for yourself and your admirers, you are but the dull echo, ‘the tenth transmitter’ of some hackneyed jest: the want of all manly and candid feeling in yourself only excites your suspicion and antipathy to it in others, as something at which your nature recoils: your slowness to understand makes you quick to misrepresent; and you infallibly make nonsense of what you cannot possibly conceive. What seem your wilful blunders are often the felicity of natural parts, and your want of penetration has all the appearance of an affected petulance!
Again, of an humble origin yourself, you recommend your performances to persons of fashion by always abusing low people, with the smartness of a lady’s waiting woman, and the independent spirit of a travelling tutor. Raised from the lowest rank to your present despicable eminence in the world of letters, you are indignant that any one should attempt to rise into notice, except by the same regular trammels and servile gradations, or should go about to separate the stamp of merit from the badge of sycophancy. The silent listener in select circles, and menial tool of noble families, you have become the oracle of Church and State. The purveyor to the prejudices or passions of a private patron succeeds, by no other title, to regulate the public taste. You have felt the inconveniences of poverty, and look up with base and groveling admiration to the advantages of wealth and power: you have had to contend with the mechanical difficulties of a want of education, and you see nothing in learning but its mechanical uses. A self-taught man naturally becomes a pedant, and mistakes the means of knowledge for the end, unless he is a man of genius; and you, Sir, are not a man of genius. From having known nothing originally, you think it a great acquisition to know anything now, no matter what or how small it is—nay, the smaller and more insignificant it is, the more curious you seem to think it, as it is farther removed from common sense and human nature. The collating of points and commas is the highest game your literary ambition can reach to, and the squabbles of editors are to you infinitely more important than the meaning of an author. You think more of the letter than the spirit of a passage; and in your eagerness to show your minute superiority over those who have gone before you, generally miss both. In comparing yourself with others, you make a considerable mistake. You suppose the common advantages of a liberal education to be something peculiar to yourself, and calculate your progress beyond the rest of the world from the obscure point at which you first set out. Yet your overweening self-complacency is never easy but in the expression of your contempt for others; like a conceited mechanic in a village ale-house, you would set down every one who differs from you as an ignorant blockhead; and very fairly infer that any one who is beneath yourself must be nothing. You have been well called an Ultra-Crepidarian critic. From the difficulty you yourself have in constructing a sentence of common grammar, and your frequent failures, you instinctively presume that no author who comes under the lash of your pen can understand his mother-tongue: and again, you suspect every one who is not your ‘very good friend’ of knowing nothing of the Greek or Latin, because you are surprised to think how you came by your own knowledge of them. There is an innate littleness and vulgarity in all you do. In combating an opinion, you never take a broad and liberal ground, state it fairly, allow what there is of truth or an appearance of truth, and then assert your own judgment by exposing what is deficient in it, and giving a more masterly view of the subject. No: this would be committing your powers and pretensions where you dare not trust them. You know yourself better. You deny the meaning altogether, misquote or misapply, and then plume yourself on your own superiority to the absurdity you have created. Your triumph over your antagonists is the triumph of your cunning and mean-spiritedness over some nonentity of your own making; and your wary self-knowledge shrinks from a comparison with any but the most puny pretensions, as the spider retreats from the caterpillar into its web.
There cannot be a greater nuisance than a dull, envious, pragmatical, low-bred man, who is placed as you are in the situation of the Editor of such a work as the Quarterly Review. Conscious that his reputation stands on very slender and narrow grounds, he is naturally jealous of that of others. He insults over unsuccessful authors; he hates successful ones. He is angry at the faults of a work; more angry at its excellences. If an opinion is old, he treats it with supercilious indifference; if it is new, it provokes his rage. Everything beyond his limited range of inquiry, appears to him a paradox and an absurdity: and he resents every suggestion of the kind as an imposition on the public, and an imputation on his own sagacity. He cavils at what he does not comprehend, and misrepresents what he knows to be true. Bound to go through the nauseous task of abusing all those who are not like himself the abject tools of power, his irritation increases with the number of obstacles he encounters, and the number of sacrifices he is obliged to make of common sense and decency to his interest and self-conceit. Every instance of prevarication he wilfully commits makes him more in love with hypocrisy, and every indulgence of his hired malignity makes him more disposed to repeat the insult and the injury. His understanding becomes daily more distorted, and his feelings more and more callous. Grown old in the service of corruption, he drivels on to the last with prostituted impotence and shameless effrontery; salves a meagre reputation for wit, by venting the driblets of his spleen and impertinence on others; answers their arguments by confuting himself; mistakes habitual obtuseness of intellect for a particular acuteness, not to be imposed upon by shallow appearances; unprincipled rancour for zealous loyalty; and the irritable, discontented, vindictive, peevish effusions of bodily pain and mental imbecility for proofs of refinement of taste and strength of understanding.
Such, Sir, is the picture of which you have sat for the outline:—all that remains is to fill up the little, mean, crooked, dirty details. The task is to me no very pleasant one; for I can feel very little ambition to follow you through your ordinary routine of pettifogging objections and barefaced assertions, the only difficulty of making which is to throw aside all regard to truth and decency, and the only difficulty in answering them is to overcome one’s contempt for the writer. But you are a nuisance, and should be abated.
I shall proceed to shew, first, your want of common honesty, in speaking of particular persons; and, secondly, your want of common capacity, in treating of any general question. It is this double negation of understanding and principle that makes you all that you are.—As an instance of the summary manner in which you dispose of any author who is not to your taste, you began your account of the first work of mine you thought proper to notice (the Round Table), with a paltry and deliberate falsehood. I need not be at much pains to shew that your opinion on the merits of a work is not of much value, after I have shewn that your word is not to be taken with respect to the author. The charges which you brought against me as the writer of that work, were chiefly these four:—1st, That I pretended to have written a work in the manner of the Spectator; I answer, this is a falsehood. The Advertisement to that work is written expressly to disclaim any such idea, and to apologise for the work’s having fallen short of the original intention of the projector (Mr. Leigh Hunt), from its execution having devolved almost entirely upon me, who had undertaken merely to furnish a set of essays and criticisms, which essays and criticisms were here collected together.—2. That I was not only a professed imitator of Addison, but a great coiner of new words and phrases: I answer, this is also a deliberate and contemptible falsehood. You have filled a paragraph with a catalogue of these new words and phrases, which you attribute to me, and single out as the particular characteristics of my style, not any one of which I have used. This you knew.—3. You say I write eternally about washerwomen. I answer, no such thing. There is indeed one paper in the Round Table on this subject, and I think a very agreeable one. I may say so, for it is not my writing.—4. You say that ‘I praise my own chivalrous eloquence’: and I answer, that’s a falsehood; and that you knew that I had not applied these words to myself, because you knew that it was not I who had used them. The last paragraph of the article in question is true: for as if to obviate the detection of this tissue of little, lying, loyal, catchpenny frauds, it contains a cunning, tacit acknowledgment of them; but says, with equal candour and modesty, that it is not the business of the writer to distinguish (in such trifling cases) between truth and falsehood. That may be; but I cannot think that for the editor of the Quarterly Review to want common veracity, is any disgrace to me. It is necessary, Sir, to go into the details of this fraudulent transaction, this Albemarle-street hoax, that the public may know, once for all, what to think of you and me. The first paragraph of the Review is couched in the following terms.
‘Whatever may have been the preponderating feelings with which we closed these volumes, we will not refuse our acknowledgments to Mr. Hazlitt for a few mirthful sensations,’ (that they were very few, I can easily believe,) ‘which he has enabled us to mingle with the rest, by the hint that his Essays were meant to be “in the manner of the Spectator and Tatler.” The passage in which this is conveyed, happened to be nearly the last to which we turned; and we were about to rise from the Round Table, heavily oppressed with a recollection of vulgar descriptions, silly paradoxes, flat truisms, misty sophistry, broken English, ill humour, and rancorous abuse, when we were first informed of the modest pretensions of our host. Our thoughts then reverted with an eager impulse to the urbanity of Addison, his unassuming tone, and clear simplicity; to the ease and softness of his style, to the chearful benevolence of his heart. The playful gaiety too, and the tender feelings of his coadjutor, poor Steele, came forcibly to our memory. The effect of the ludicrous contrast thus presented to us, it would be somewhat difficult to describe. We think that it was akin to what we have felt from the admirable nonchalance with which Liston, in the complex character of a weaver and an ass, seems to throw away all doubt of his being the most accomplished lover in the universe, and receives, as if they were merely his due, the caresses of the fairy queen.’—Quarterly Review, No. xxxiii. p. 154.
The advertisement prefixed to the Round Table, in which the hint is conveyed which afforded you ‘a few mirthful sensations,’ stood thus.—
‘The following work falls somewhat short of its title and original intention. It was proposed by my friend Mr. Hunt, to publish a series of papers in the Examiner, in the manner of the early periodical essayists, the Spectator and Tatler. These papers were to be contributed by various persons on a variety of subjects; and Mr. Hunt, as the editor, was to take the characteristic or dramatic part of the work upon himself. I undertook to furnish occasional essays and criticisms; one or two other friends promised their assistance; but the essence of the work was to be miscellaneous. The next thing was to fix upon a title for it. After much doubtful consultation, that of The Round Table was agreed upon, as most descriptive of its nature and design. But our plan had been no sooner arranged and entered upon, than Buonaparte landed at Frejus, et voila la Table Ronde dissoute. Our little Congress was broken up as well as the great one. Politics called off the attention of the Editor from the belles lettres; and the task of continuing the work fell chiefly upon the person who was least able to give life and spirit to the original design. A want of variety in the subjects, and mode of treating them, is, perhaps, the least disadvantage resulting from this circumstance. All the papers in the two volumes here offered to the public, were written by myself and Mr. Hunt, except a letter communicated by a friend in the sixteenth number. Out of the fifty-two numbers, twelve are Mr. Hunt’s, with the signatures L. H. or H. T. For all the rest I am answerable. W. Hazlitt.’
Such, Sir, is the passage to which you allude, with so much hysterical satisfaction, as having let you into the secret that I fancied myself to have produced a work ‘in the manner of the Spectator and Tatler’; and as having relieved you from the extreme uneasiness you had felt in reading through the ‘vulgar descriptions, silly paradoxes, flat truisms, misty sophistry, broken English, ill humour, and rancorous abuse,’ contained in the Round Table. If I had indeed given myself out for a second Steele or Addison, I should have made a very ludicrous mistake. As it is, it is you have made a wilful misstatement. Your oppression, Sir, in rising from the Round Table, must have been great to put you upon so desperate an expedient to divert your chagrin, as that of affecting to suppose that I had said just the contrary of what I did say, in order that you might affect ‘a few mirthful sensations’ at my expence. I cannot say that I envy you the little voluntary revulsion which your feelings underwent, at the ludicrous comparison which you fancy me to make between myself and Addison, on purpose to indulge the suggestions of your spleen and prejudice. These are among the last refinements, the menus plaisirs of hypocrisy, of which I must remain in ignorance. I will not require you to retract the assertion you have made, but I will take care before I have done, that any assertion you may make with respect to me shall not be taken as current. As to your praise of the Tatler and Spectator, I must at all times agree to it: but as far as it was meant as a tacit reproof to my vanity in comparing myself with these authors, it appears to have been unnecessary. You say elsewhere, speaking of some passage of mine—‘Addison never wrote anything so fine!’—and again that I fancy myself a finer writer than Addison. By your uneasy jealousy of the self-conceit of other people, it should seem that you are in the habit of drawing comparisons, ‘secret, sweet, and precious,’ between yourself and your ‘illustrious predecessors’ not much to their advantage. As you have here thought proper to tell me what I do not think, I will tell you what I do think, which is, that you could not have written the passage in question, On the Progress of Arts, because you never felt half the enthusiasm for what is fine.
2. After stating the pretensions of the work, you proceed to the style in which it is written.—‘There is one merit which this author possesses besides that of successful imitation—he is a very eminent creator of words and phrases. Amongst a vast variety which have newly started up we notice “firesider”—“kitcheny”—“to smooth up”—“to do off”—and “to tiptoe down.” To this we add a few of the author’s new-born phrases, which bear sufficient marks of a kindred origin to entitle them to a place by their side. Such is the assertion that Spenser “was dipt in poetic luxury”; the description of “a minute coil which clicks in the baking coal”—of “a numerousness scattering an individual gusto”—and of “curls that are ripe with sun shine.” Our readers are perhaps by this time as much acquainted with the style of this author as they have any desire to be,’ etc.
I have nothing to do at present with the merits of the words or phrases, which you here attribute to me, and make the test of my general style, as if your readers truly if they persisted would find only a constant repetition of them in my writings. I say that they are not mine at all; that they are not characteristic of my style, that you knew this perfectly, and also that there were reasons which prevented me from pointing out this petty piece of chicanery; and farther, I say that I am so far from being ‘a very eminent creator of words and phrases,’ that I do not believe you can refer to an instance in anything I have written in which there is a single new word or phrase. In fact, I am as tenacious on this score of never employing any new words to express my ideas, as you, Sir, are of never expressing any ideas that are not perfectly thread-bare and commonplace. My style is as old as your matter. This is the fault you at other times find with it, mistaking the common idiom of the language for ‘broken English.’
3. You say that ‘I write eternally about washerwomen’; and pray, if I did, what is that to you, Sir? There is a littleness in your objections which makes even the answers to them ridiculous, and which would make it impossible to notice them, were you not the Government-Critic. You say yourself indeed afterwards that ‘It is he’ (Mr. Hunt) ‘who devotes ten or twelve pages to a dissertation on washerwomen.’ Good: what you say on this subject is a fair specimen of your mind and manners. The playing at fast-and-loose with the matter-of-fact may be passed over as a matter of course in your hypercritical lucubrations. There is but one half paper on this interdicted subject in the Round Table:—you have filled one page out of five of the article in the Review with a ridicule of this paper on account of the vulgarity of the subject, which offends you exceedingly; you recur to it twice afterwards en passant, and end your performance (somewhat in the style of a quack-doctor aping his own merry-andrew) with ‘two or three conclusive digs in the side at it.’ There is something in the subject that makes a strong impression on your mind. You seem ‘to hate it with a perfect hatred.’[[73]] Now I would ask where is the harm of this dissertation on washerwomen inserted in the Round Table, any more than those of Dutch and Flemish kitchen-pieces, the glossy brilliancy and high finishing of which must have become familiar to your eye in the collections of Earl Grosvenor, Lord Mulgrave, and the Marquis of Stafford? What has Mr. Hunt done in this never-to-be forgiven paper to betray the lowness of his breeding or sentiments, or to shew that he who wrote it is ‘the droll or merry fellow of the piece,’ and that I who did not write it am ‘a sour Jacobin, who hate everything but washerwomen’? Would Addison or Steele, ‘poor Steele’ as you call him, have brought this as a capital charge against their ‘imitators’? Did they instinctively direct their speculations or limit their views of human life to ‘remarks on gentlemen and gentlewomen’? They often enough treated of low people and familiar life without any consciousness of degradation. ‘Their gorge did not rise’ at the humble worth or homely enjoyments of their fellow-creatures, like your’s. A coronet or a mitre were not the only things that caught their jaundiced eye, or soothed their rising gall. They who are always talking of high and low people are generally of a vulgar origin themselves, and of an inherent meanness of disposition which nothing can overcome. Besides, there is a want of good faith, as well as of good taste, in your affected fastidiousness on this point. ‘You assume a vice, though you have it not,’ or not to the degree, which your petulance and servility would have us suppose. A short time before you wrote this uncalled-for tirade against Mr. Hunt as an exclusive patroniser of that class of females, ycleped ‘washerwomen,’ he had quoted with praise in the Examiner, and as a mark of tender and humane feelings in the author, in spite of appearances to the contrary, the following epitaph from the Gentleman’s Magazine.
‘Epitaph by William Gifford, Esq.
‘We are no friends, publicly speaking, to the author of the following epitaph. We differ much with his politics, and with the cast of his satire; and do not think him, properly speaking, a poet, as many do. But we always admired the spirit that looked forth from his account of his own life, and the touching copy of verses on a departed friend, that are to be found in the notes to one of his satires; and there are feelings and circumstances in this world, before which politics and satire, and poetry, are of little importance’—(How little knew’st thou of Calista!)—‘feelings, that triumph over infirmity and distaste of every sort, and only render us anxious, in our respect for them, to be thought capable of appreciating them ourselves. The world, with all its hubbub, slides away from before one on such occasions; and we only see humanity in all its better weakness, and let us add, in all its beauty.
‘The author will think what he pleases of this effusion of ours. It is an interval in the battle, during which we only wish to show ourselves fellow-men with him. Afterwards, he may resume his hostilities, if he has any, and we will draw our swords as before.
For the ‘Gentleman’s Magazine.’ Dec. 18, 1815.
‘Mr. Urban,—I am one of those who love to contemplate the “frail memorials” of the dead, and do not, therefore, count the solitary hours, occasionally spent in a church-yard, among the most melancholy ones of my life. But in London, this is a gratification rarely to be found; for, either through caution, or some less worthy motive, the cemeteries are closed against the stranger. I have been in the practice of passing by the chapel in South Audley Street, Grosvenor Square, almost every day, for several weeks, yet never saw the door of the burying-ground open till yesterday. I did not neglect the opportunity thus offered, but walked in. I found it far more spacious and airy than I expected; but I met with nothing very novel or interesting till I came to a low tomb, plain but neat, where I was both pleased and surprised by the following inscription, which, I believe, has never yet appeared in print, and which seems not unworthy of your miscellany.
M. D.
Here lies the Body
of ANN DAVIES,
(for more than twenty years)
Servant to William Gifford.[[74]]
She died February 6, 1815,
in the forty-third year of her age,
of a tedious and painful malady,
which she bore
with exemplary patience and resignation.
Her deeply-afflicted master
erected this stone to her memory,
as a faithful testimony
of her uncommon worth,
and of his perpetual gratitude,
respect and affection,
for her long and meritorious services.
Though here unknown, dear Ann, thy ashes rest,
Still lives thy memory in one grateful breast,
That traced thy course through many a painful year,
And marked thy humble hope, thy pious fear.—
O! when this frame, which yet, while life remained,
Thy duteous love, with trembling hand, sustained,
Dissolves (as soon it must) may that Bless’d Pow’r
Who beamed on thine, illume my parting hour!
So shall I greet thee, where no ills annoy,
And what was sown in grief, is reap’d in joy;
Where worth, obscured below, bursts into day,
And those are paid, whom Earth could never pay.’[[75]]
It seems then, you can extract the pathetic though not the humorous, out of persons who are not ‘gentlemen or gentlewomen.’ It was the amiable weakness thus noticed, that made you take such pains to do away the suspicion of a particular partiality for low people. You could not afford ‘the frail memorial’ of your private virtues to get beyond the inscription on a tomb-stone, or the poet’s corner of the Gentleman’s Magazine. The natural sympathies of the undoubted translator of Juvenal might be a prejudice to the official character of the anonymous editor of the Quarterly Review. You were determined to hear no more of this epitaph, and ‘other such dulcet diseases’[[76]] of yours.—You perhaps recollect, Sir, that the columns of the Examiner newspaper, which gave you such a premature or posthumous credit for some ‘compunctious visitings of nature,’ also contained the first specimen of the Story of Rimini. You seem to have said on that occasion with Iago, ‘You are well tuned now,—but I’ll set down the pegs that make this music, as honest as I am.’—That Mr. Hunt should have supposed it possible for a moment, that a government automaton was accessible to anything like a liberal concession, is one of those deplorable mistakes which constantly put men who are ‘made of penetrable stuff,’ at the mercy of those who are not. The amiable and elegant author of Rimini thought he was appealing to something human in your breast, in the recollection of your ‘Dear Ann Davies’; he touched the springs, and found them ‘stuffed with paltry blurred sheets’ of the Quarterly Review, with notes from Mr. Murray, and directions how to proceed with the author, from the Admiralty Scribe. You retorted his sympathy with ‘one whom earth could never pay,’ by laughing to scorn his honest laborious ‘tub-tumbling viragos,’ whose red elbows and coarse fists prevented so inelegant a contrast to the pining and sickly form whose loss you deplore. Is there anything in your nature and disposition that draws to it only the infirm in body and oppressed in mind; or that, while it clings to power for support, seeks consolation in the daily soothing spectacle of physical malady or morbid sensibility? The air you breathe seems to infect; and your friendship to be a canker-worm that blights its objects with unwholesome and premature decay. You are enamoured of suffering, and are at peace only with the dead.—Even if you had been accessible to remorse as a political critic, Mr. Hunt had committed himself with you (past forgiveness) in your character of a pretender to poetry about town. The following lines in his Feast of the Poets, must have occasioned you ‘a few mirthful sensations,’ which you have not yet acknowledged, except by deeds.—
‘A hem was then heard, consequential and snapping,
And a sour little gentleman walked with a rap in.
He bow’d, look’d about him, seem’d cold, and sat down,
And said,[[77]] “I’m surpris’d that you’ll visit this town:—
To be sure, there are one or two of us who know you,
But as for the rest, they are all much below you.
So stupid, in general, the natives are grown,
They really prefer Scotch reviews to their own;
So that what with their taste, their reformers, and stuff,
They have sicken’d myself and my friends long enough.”
“Yourself and your friends!” cried the God in high glee;
“And pray my frank visitor, who may you be?”
“Who be?” cried the other; “why really—this tone—
William Gifford’s a name, I think pretty well known.”
“Oh—now I remember,” said Phœbus;—“ah true—
My thanks to that name are undoubtedly due:
The rod, that got rid of the Cruscas and Lauras,
—That plague of the butterflies—sav’d me the horrors;
The Juvenal too stops a gap in one’s shelf,
At least in what Dryden has not done himself;
And there’s something, which even distaste must respect,
In the self-taught example, that conquer’d neglect.
But not to insist on the recommendations
Of modesty, wit, and a small stock of patience,
My visit just now is to poets alone,
And not to small critics, however well known.”
So saying, he rang, to leave nothing in doubt,
And the sour little gentleman bless’d himself out.’
Thus painters write their names at Co. For this passage and the temperate and judicious note which accompanies it, it is no wonder that you put the author—of Rimini, in Newgate, without the Sheriff’s warrant. In order to give as favourable an impression of that poem as you could, you began your account of it by saying that it had been composed in Newgate, though you knew that it had not; but you also knew that the name of Newgate would sound more grateful to certain ears, to pour flattering poison into which is the height of your abject ambition. In this courtly inuendo which ushered in your wretched verbal criticism (it is the more disgusting to see such gross and impudent prevarication combined with such petty captiousness) you were guided not by a regard to truth, but to your own ends; and yet you say somewhere, very oracularly, out of contradiction to me, that ‘not to prefer the true to the agreeable, where they are inconsistent, is folly.’ You have mistaken the word: it is not folly, but knavery.[[78]]
4. You say you have no objection to my ‘praising my own chivalrous eloquence’; and I say that the insinuation is impertinent and untrue. The paper in which that phrase occurs is written by Mr. Hunt, as you know, and is an answer to some observations of mine on the poetical temperament in a preceding number On the Causes of Methodism. Mr. Hunt’s having taken upon him ‘to praise my chivalrous eloquence,’ without consulting you, appeared no doubt a great piece of presumption; and you punished me by magnifying this indiscretion into the enormity of my having praised myself. I might as well say that Mr. Canning had made a fulsome eulogy on his own private virtues and public principles in your dedication of the edition of Ben Jonson to him.—You say indeed in the last paragraph of your criticism that ‘you understand some of the papers to be by Mr. Hunt; that it is he who is the droll or merry fellow of the piece; who has shocked you by writing eternally about washerwomen, etc. but that you cannot stay to distinguish between us, and that we must divide our respective share of merit between ourselves.’ The share of merit in that work may indeed be so small that it is of little consequence who has the reversion of any part of it, but I will take care that a cat’s-paw shall not be put on the pannel of my quantum meruit, nor take measure of my capacity with a mechanic rule, marked by ignorance and servility, nor turn the scale of public opinion by throwing in false weights as he pleases, nor make both of us ridiculous, by attributing to each the peculiarities of the other, with whatever exaggerated interpretation he chuses to put upon them. By this transposition of persons, which is not a matter of indifference as you pretend, you gain this advantage which you have no right to gain. You can at any time apply to me or Mr. Hunt the obnoxious points in your account of either, and improve upon them, as it suits your purpose. By combining the extremes of individual character, you make a very strange and wilful compound of your own. It is the same person, and yet it is not one person but two persons, according to the critical creed you would establish, who is a merry fellow, and a sour Jacobin; who is all gaiety and all gloom; a person who rails at poets, and yet is himself a poet; a hater of cats, and of cat’s-paws;[[79]] a reviler of Mr. Pitt, and a panegyrist upon washerwomen. If, Sir, your friend, Mr. Hoppner, of whom, as you tell us[[80]] you discreetly said nothing, while he was struggling with obscurity, lest it should be imputed to the partiality of friendship, but whom you praised and dedicated to, as soon as he became popular, to shew your disinterestedness and deference to public opinion, if even this artist, whom you celebrate as a painter of flattering likenesses, had undertaken to unite in one piece the most striking features and characteristic expression of his and your common friends, had improved your lurking archness of look into Mr. Murray’s gentle, downcast obliquity of vision; had joined Mr. Canning’s drooping nose to Mr. Croker’s aspiring chin, the clear complexion (the splendida bilis) of the one, to the candid self-complacent aspect of the other; had forced into the same preposterous medley, the invincible hauteur and satanic pride of Mr. Pitt’s physiognomy, with the dormant meaning and admirable nonchalance of Lord Castlereagh’s features, the manly sleekness of Charles Long, and the monumental outline of John Kemble—what mortal would have owned the likeness!—I too, Sir, must claim the privilege of the principium individuationis, for myself as well as my neighbours; I will sit for no man’s picture but my own, and not to you for that; I am not desirous to play so many parts as Bottom, and as to his ass’s head which you would put upon my shoulders, it will do for you to wear the next time you shew yourself in Mr. Murray’s shop, or for your friend Mr. Southey to take with him, whenever he appears at Court.
As to the difference of political sentiment between the writer of the Round Table and the writer of the article in the Review, which forms the heavy burthen of your flippant censure, I cannot consider that as an accusation. You have many other objections to make: such as that, because Mr. Addison wrote some very pleasing papers on the Pleasures of the Imagination, I am not willing to fall short of ‘my illustrious predecessor’; and ‘accordingly,’ you say, ‘we hear much of poetry and of painting, and of music and of gusto.’ Is this the only reason you can conceive why any one should take an interest in such things; or did you write your Baviad and Mæviad that you might not fall short of Pope, your translation of Juvenal that you might surpass Dryden, or did you turn commentator on the poets, that you might be on a par with ‘your illustrious predecessors’—‘from slashing Bentley down to piddling Theobalds’? Of Hogarth you make me say, quoting from your favourite treatise on washerwomen, that ‘he is too apt to perk morals and sentiments in your face.’ You cannot comprehend my definition of gusto, which you do not ascribe to any defect in yourself. My account of Titian and Vandyke’s colouring, appears to you very odd, because it is like the things described, and you have no idea of the things described. If I had described the style of these two painters in terms applicable to them both, and to all other painters, you would have thought the precision of the style equal to the justness of the sentiment. A distinction without a difference satisfies you, for you can understand or repeat a common-place. It is the pointing out the real differences of things that offends you, for you have no idea of what is meant; and a writer who gets at all below the surface of a question, necessarily gets beyond your depth, and you can hardly contain your wonder at his presumption and shallowness. You quote half a dozen detached sentences of mine, as ‘convincing instances of affectation and paradox,’ (such as, The definition of a true patriot is a good hater—He who speaks two languages has no country, etc.) and which taken from the context to which they belong, and of which they are brought as extreme illustrations, may be so, but which you cannot answer in the connection in which they stand, and which you detach from the general speculation with which you dare not cope, to bring them more into the focus of your microscopic vision, and that you may deal with them more at ease and in safety on your old ground of literal and verbal quibbling.
You do not like the subjects of my Essays in general. You complain in particular of ‘my eager vituperation of good nature and good-natured people’; and yet with this you have, as I should take it, nought to do: you object to my sweeping abuse of poets, as (with the exception of Milton) dishonest men,[[81]] with which you have as little to do; you are no poet, and of course, honest! You do not like my abuse of the Scotch at which the Irish were delighted, nor my abuse of the Irish at which the Scotch were not displeased, nor my abuse of the English, which I can understand; but I wonder you should not like my abuse of the French. You say indeed that ‘no abuse which is directed against whole classes of men is of much importance,’ and yet you and your Anti-Jacobin friends have been living upon this sort of abuse for the last twenty years. You add with characteristic ‘no meaning’—‘If undeserved, it is utterly impotent and may be well utterly despised.’ The last part of the proposition may be true, but abuse is not without effect, because undeserved, nor is a thing utterly impotent because it is thoroughly despicable. You, Sir, have power which is considerable, in proportion as it is despicable!
I confess, Sir, the Round Table did not take; ‘it was Caveare to the multitude,’ but the reason, I think, was not that the abuse in it was undeserved, but that I have there spoken the truth of too many persons and things. In writing it, I preferred the true to the agreeable, which I find to be an unpardonable fault. Yet I am not aware of any sentiment in the work which ought to give offence to an honest and inquiring mind, for I think there is none that does not evidently proceed from a conviction of its truth and a bias to what is right. My object in writing it was to set down such observations as had occurred to me from time to time on different subjects, and as appeared to be any ways worth preserving. I wished to make a sort of Liber Veritatis, a set of studies from human life. As my object was not to flatter, neither was it to offend or contradict others, but to state my own feelings or opinions such as they really were, but more particularly of course when this had not been done before, and where I thought I could throw any new light upon a subject. In doing so, I endeavoured to fix my attention only on the thing I was writing about, and which had struck me in some particular manner, which I wished to point out to others, with the best reasons or explanations I could give. I was not the slave of prejudices; nor do I think I was the dupe of my own vanity. To repeat what has been said a thousand times is common-place: to contradict it because it has been so said, is not originality. A truth is, however, not the worse but the better for being new. I did not try to think with the multitude nor to differ with them, but to think for myself; and the having done this with some boldness and some effect is the height of my offending. I wrote to the public with the same sincerity and want of disguise as if I had been making a register of my private thoughts; and this has been construed by some into a breach of decorum. The affectation I have been accused of was merely my sometimes stating a thing in an extreme point of view for fear of not being understood; and my love of paradox may, I think, be accounted for from the necessity of counteracting the obstinacy of prejudice. If I have been led to carry a remark too far, it was because others would not allow it to have any force at all. My object was to shew the latent operation of some unsuspected principle, and I therefore took only some one view of that particular subject. I was chiefly anxious that the germ of thought should be true and original; that I should put others in possession of what I meant, and then left it to find its level in the operation of common sense, and to have its excesses corrected by other causes. The principle will be found true, even where the application is extravagant or partial. I have not been wedded to my particular speculations with the spirit of a partisan. I wrote for instance an Essay on Pedantry, to qualify the extreme contempt into which it has fallen, and to shew the necessary advantages of an absorption of the whole mind in some favourite study, and I wrote an Essay on the Ignorance of the Learned to lessen the undue admiration of Learning, and to shew that it is not everything. I gained very few converts to either of these opinions. You reproach me with the cynical turn of many of my Essays, which are in fact prose-satires; but when you say I hate every thing but washerwomen, you forget what you had before said that I was a great imitator of Addison, and wrote much about ‘poetry and painting, and music and gusto.’ You make no mention of my character of Rousseau, or of the paper on Actors and Acting. You also forget my praise of John Buncle! As to my style, I thought little about it. I only used the word which seemed to me to signify the idea I wanted to convey, and I did not rest till I had got it. In seeking for truth, I sometimes found beauty. As to the facility of which you, Sir, and others accuse me, it has not been acquired at once nor without pains. I was eight years in writing eight pages, under circumstances of inconceivable and ridiculous discouragement. As to my figurative and gaudy phraseology, you reproach me with it because you never heard of what I had written in my first dry manner. I afterwards found a popular mode of writing necessary to convey subtle and difficult trains of reasoning, and something more than your meagre vapid style, to force attention to original observations, which did not restrict themselves to making a parade of the discovery of a worm-eaten date, or the repetition of an obsolete prejudice. You say that it is impossible to remember what I write after reading it:—One remembers to have read what you write—before! In that you have the advantage of me, to be sure. You in vain endeavour to account for the popularity of some of my writings, from the trick of arranging words in a variety of forms without any correspondent ideas, like the newly-invented optical toy. You have not hit upon the secret, nor will you be able to avail yourself of it when I tell you. It is the old story—that I think what I please, and say what I think. This accounts, Sir, for the difference between you and me in so many respects. I think only of the argument I am defending; you are only thinking whether you write grammar. My opinions are founded on reasons which I try to give; yours are governed by motives which you keep to yourself. It has been my business all my life to get at the truth as well as I could, merely to satisfy my own mind: it has been yours to suppress the evidence of your senses and the dictates of your understanding, if you ever found them at variance with your convenience or the caprices of others. I do not suppose you ever in your life took an interest in any abstract question for its own sake, or have a conception of the possibility of any one else doing so. If you had, you would hardly insist on my changing characters with you. Yet you make this the condition of my receiving any favour or lenity at your hands. It is no matter, Sir: I will try to do without it.
It appears by your own account, that all the other offences of the Round Table would hardly have roused your resentment, had it not been that I have spoken of Mr. Pitt and Mr. Burke, not in the hackneyed terms of a treasury underling. It was this that filled up the measure of my iniquity, and the storm burst on my devoted head. After quoting one or two half sentences from the character of Mr. Pitt,[[82]] in which I ascribe the influence of his oratory almost entirely to a felicitous and imposing arrangement of words, and the whole of a short note on Mr. Burke’s political apostacy, which I had fancifully ascribed to his jealousy of Rousseau, you add with great sincerity:—‘We are far from intending to write a single word in answer to this loathsome trash’—(it would have been well if you had made and kept the same resolution in other cases,) ‘but we confess that these passages chiefly excited us to take the trouble of noticing the work. The author might have described washerwomen for ever; complimented himself unceasingly on his own “chivalrous eloquence”; prosed interminably about Chaucer; written, if possible, in a more affected, silly, confused, ungrammatical style, and believed, as he now believes, that he was surpassing Addison, we should not have meddled with him; but if the creature, in his endeavours to crawl into the light, must take his way over the tombs of illustrious men, disfiguring the records of their greatness with the slime and filth which marks his track, it is right to point him out that he may be flung back to the situation in which nature designed that he should grovel’ p. 159. And this, Sir, from you who wrote or procured to be inserted in the Quarterly Review, that nefarious attack on the character of Mr. Fox, which was distinguished and is still remembered among the slime and filth which has marked its track into day, over the characters and feelings of the living and the dead. If I, Sir, had written that ‘foul and vulgar invective’ against an individual whom you did not choose to let ‘rest in his grave,’ if I had been ‘such a thing’ as the writer of that article, I might, (as you say,) have described washerwomen for ever, and have fancied myself a better writer than ‘the courtly Addison,’ and you, Sir, would have encouraged me in the delusion, for I should have been a court-tool, your tool. But you state the thing clearly and unanswerably. I was not a court-tool, your tool, and therefore I was to be made your victim. There is a difference of political opinion between you and me; therefore you undertake not only to condemn that opinion, but to proscribe the writer. Do you do this on your own authority, or on Mr. Croker’s, or on whose? As I did not consider it as sacrilege to criticise the style and the opinions of the two great men who have contributed to make this country what it is, a fief held by a junto, of which men like you are the organs, in trust and for the benefit of the common cause of despotism throughout Europe, I, and every other writer like me, professing or maintaining anything like independence of spirit or consistency of opinion, is ‘to be flung back into his original obscurity, and stifled in the filth and slime’ of the Quarterly Review, or its drain, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. You began the experiment upon the Round Table; you have tried it twice since, and for the last time.
If any doubts could ever have been entertained on the subject of your motives and views, you have taken care to remove them. Thus you conclude your account of the characters of Shakespear’s plays with saying, that you should not have condescended to notice the senseless and wicked sophistry of the work at all, but that ‘you conceived it might not be unprofitable to shew how small a portion of talent and literature is necessary to carry on the trade of sedition.’ I should think it requires as much talent and literature to carry on my trade as yours. This acknowledgment of yours is ‘remarkable for its truth and naiveté.’ It is a pledge from your own mouth of your impartiality and candour. With this object in view, ‘you have selected a few specimens of my ethics and criticism,’ (they are very few, and of course you would select no others,) just sufficient, (with your garbling and additions,) to prove ‘that my knowledge of Shakespear and the English language is exactly on a par with the purity of my morals, and the depth of my understanding.’ But did it not occur to you in making this officious declaration, or would it not occur to any one else in reading it, that this undertaking of yours might be no less ‘profitable’ and acceptable, even supposing the portion of talent displayed by the author not to be small but great? Would it not be more necessary in this case to do away the scandal that there was any talent or literature on the side of ‘sedition’? The greater the shock given to the complacency of servility and corruption, by an opinion getting abroad that there was any knowledge of Shakespear or the English language except on the minister’s side of the question, would it not be the more absolutely incumbent on you as the head of the literary police, to arrest such an opinion in the outset, to crush it before it gathered strength, and to produce the article in question as your warrant? Why, what a disgrace to literature and to loyalty, if owing to the neglect and supineness of the editor of the Quarterly Review, a work written without an atom of cant or hypocrisy, and of course with a very small portion of talent and literature, should, in the space of three months get into a second edition, and be fast advancing to a third, be noticed in the Edinburgh Review, and be talked of by persons who never looked into the Examiner; and how necessary without loss of time, to counteract the mischievous inference from all this, restore the taste of the public to its legitimate tone, and satisfy the courteous reader, who ‘was well affected to the constitution in church and state as now established,’ that in future he must look for a knowledge of Shakespear only in the editor of Ben Jonson, of the English language in the private tutor of Lord Grosvenor, for purity of morals in the translator of Juvenal, and for depth of understanding in the notes to the Baviad and Mæviad! Your employers, Mr. Gifford, do not pay their hirelings for nothing—for condescending to notice weak and wicked sophistry; for pointing out to contempt what excites no admiration; for cautiously selecting a few specimens of bad taste and bad grammar, where nothing else is to be found. They want your invincible pertness, your mercenary malice, your impenetrable dulness, your barefaced impudence, your pragmatical self-sufficiency, your hypocritical zeal, your pious frauds to stand in the gap of their prejudices and pretensions, to fly-blow and taint public opinion, to defeat independent efforts, to apply not the sting of the scorpion but the touch of the torpedo to youthful hopes, to crawl and leave the slimy track of sophistry and lies over every work that does not ‘dedicate its sweet leaves’ to some luminary of the Treasury Bench, or is not fostered in the hot-bed of corruption. This is your office; ‘this is what is looked for at your hands, and this you do not baulk’—to sacrifice what little honesty, and prostitute what little intellect you possess to any dirty job you are commissioned to execute. ‘They keep you as an ape does an apple, in the corner of his jaw, first mouthed to be last swallowed.’ You are, by appointment, literary toad-eater to greatness, and taster to the court. You have a natural aversion to whatever differs from your own pretensions, and an acquired one for what gives offence to your superiors. Your vanity panders to your interest, and your malice truckles only to your love of power. If your instinctive or premeditated abuse of your enviable trust were found wanting in a single instance; if you were to make a single slip in getting up your select Committee of Inquiry and Green Bag Report of the State of Letters, your occupation would be gone. You would never after obtain a squeeze of the hand from a great man, or a smile from a punk of quality. The great and powerful (whom you call the wise and good) do not like to have the privacy of their self-love startled by the obtrusive and unmanageable claims of literature and philosophy, except through the intervention of persons like you, whom, if they have common penetration, they soon find out to be without any superiority of intellect; or, if they do not, whom they can despise for their meanness of soul. You ‘have the office opposite to St. Peter.’ You ‘keep a corner in the public mind, for foul prejudice and corrupt power to knot and gender in’; you volunteer your services to people of quality to ease scruples of mind and qualms of conscience; you ‘lay the flattering unction’ of venal prose and laurelled verse to their souls. You persuade them that there is neither purity of morals, nor depth of understanding, except in themselves and their hangers-on; and would prevent the unhallowed names of liberty and humanity from being ever whispered in ears polite! You, Sir, do you not do all this? I cry you mercy then: I took you for the Editor of the Quarterly Review!
In general, you wisely avoid committing yourself upon any question, farther than to hint a difference of opinion, and to assume an air of self-importance upon it. Thus you say, after quoting some remarks of mine, not very respectful to Henry VIII. ‘We need not answer this gabble,’ as if you were offended at its absurdity, not at its truth; and were yourself ready to assert (were it worth while) that Henry VIII. was an estimable character, or that he had not his minions and creatures about him in his life-time, who were proud to hail him as the best of kings. If so, you have the authority of Mr. Burke against you, who indulges himself in a very Jacobinical strain of invective against this bloated pattern of royalty, and brute-image of the Divinity. Do you mean to say, that the circumstances of external pomp and unbridled power, which I have pointed out in ‘the gabble you will not answer’ as determining the character of kings, do not make them what for the most part they are, feared in their life-time and scorned by after-ages? If so, you must think Quevedo a libeller and incendiary, who makes his guide to the infernal regions, on being asked ‘if there were no more kings,’ answer emphatically—‘Here are all that ever lived!’ You say that ‘the mention of a court or of a king always throws me into a fit of raving.’ Do you then really admire those plague spots of history, and scourges of human nature, Richard II., Richard III., King John, and Henry VIII.? Do you with Mr. Coleridge, in his late Lectures, contend that not to fall down in prostration of soul before the abstract majesty of kings as it is seen in the diminished perspective of centuries, argues an inherent littleness of mind? Or do you extend the moral of your maxim—‘Speak not of the imputed weaknesses of the Great’—beyond the living to the dead, thus passing an attainder on history, and proving ‘truth to be a liar’ from the beginning? ‘Speak out, Grildrig!’
You do well to confine yourself to the hypocrite; for you have too little talent for the sophist. Yet in two instances you have attempted an answer to an opinion I had expressed; and in both you have shewn how little you can understand the commonest question. The first is as follows:—‘In his remarks upon Coriolanus, which contain the concentrated venom of his malignity, he has libelled our great poet as a friend of arbitrary power, in order that he may introduce an invective against human nature. “Shakspeare himself seems to have had a leaning to the arbitrary side of the question, perhaps from some feeling of contempt for his own origin; and to have spared no occasion of baiting the rabble.”’
How do you prove that he did not? By shewing with a little delicate insinuation how he would have done just what I say he did.—‘Shall we not be dishonouring the gentle Shakspeare by answering such calumny, when every page of his works supplies its refutation?’[[83]]—‘Who has painted with more cordial feelings the tranquil innocence of humble life?’ [True.] ‘Who has furnished more instructive lessons to the great upon “the insolence of office”—“the oppressor’s wrong”—or the abuses of brief authority’—[which you would hallow through all time]—‘or who has more severely stigmatised those “who crook the pregnant hinges of the knee where thrift may follow fawning?”’ [Granted, none better.] ‘It is true he was not actuated by an envious hatred of greatness’—[so that to stigmatise servility and corruption does not always proceed from envy and a love of mischief]—‘he was not at all likely, had he lived in our time, to be an orator in Spa-fields or the editor of a seditious Sunday newspaper’—[To have delivered Mr. Coleridge’s Conciones ad Populum, or to have written Mr. Southey’s Wat Tyler]—‘he knew what discord would follow if degree were taken away’—[As it did in France from the taking away the degree between the tyrant and the slave, and those little convenient steps and props of it, the Bastile, Lettres de Cachet, and Louis XV.‘s Palais aux cerfs]—‘And therefore, with the wise and good of every age, he pointed out the injuries that must arise to society from a turbulent rabble instigated to mischief by men not much more enlightened, and infinitely more worthless than themselves.’
So that it would appear by your own account that Shakspeare had a discreet leaning to the arbitrary side of the question, and, had he lived in our time, would probably have been a writer in the Courier, or a contributor to the Quarterly Review! It is difficult to know which to admire most in this, the weakness or the cunning. I have said that Shakspeare has described both sides of the question, and you ask me very wisely, ‘Did he confine himself to one?’ No, I say that he did not: but I suspect that he had a leaning to one side, and has given it more quarter than it deserved. My words are: ‘Coriolanus is a storehouse of political common-places. The arguments for and against aristocracy and democracy, on the privileges of the few and the claims of the many, on liberty and slavery, power and the abuse of it, peace and war, are here very ably handled, with the spirit of a poet and the acuteness of a philosopher. Shakspeare himself seems to have had a leaning to the arbitrary side of the question, perhaps from some feeling of contempt for his own origin, and to have spared no occasion of baiting the rabble. What he says of them is very true: what he says of their betters is also very true, though he dwells less upon it.’
I then proceed to account for this by shewing how it is that ‘the cause of the people is but little calculated for a subject for poetry; or that the language of poetry naturally falls in with the language of power.’ I affirm, Sir, that poetry, that the imagination, generally speaking, delights in power, in strong excitement, as well as in truth, in good, in right, whereas, pure reason and the moral sense approve only of the true and good. I proceed to shew that this general love or tendency to immediate excitement or theatrical effect, no matter how produced, gives a bias to the imagination often inconsistent with the greatest good, that in poetry it triumphs over principle, and bribes the passions to make a sacrifice of common humanity. You say that it does not, that there is no such original sin in poetry, that it makes no such sacrifice or unworthy compromise between poetical effect and the still small voice of reason. And how do you prove that there is no such principle giving a bias to the imagination, and a false colouring to poetry? Why by asking in reply to the instances where this principle operates, and where no other can, with much modesty and simplicity—‘But are these the only topics that afford delight in poetry, etc.’ No; but these objects do afford delight in poetry, and they afford it in proportion to their strong and often tragical effect, and not in proportion to the good produced, or their desirableness in a moral point of view. ‘Do we read with more pleasure of the ravages of a beast of prey, than of the shepherd’s pipe upon the mountain?’ No; but we do read with pleasure of the ravages of a beast of prey, and we do so on the principle I have stated, namely, from the sense of power abstracted from the sense of good; and it is the same principle that makes us read with admiration and reconciles us in fact to the triumphant progress of the conquerors and mighty hunters of mankind, who come to stop the shepherd’s pipe upon the mountains, and sweep away his listening flock. Do you mean to deny that there is anything imposing to the imagination in power, in grandeur, in outward shew, in the accumulation of individual wealth and luxury, at the expense of equal justice and the common weal? Do you deny that there is anything in ‘the pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war, that makes ambition virtue,’ in the eyes of admiring multitudes? Is this a new theory of the Pleasures of the Imagination, which says that the pleasures of the imagination do not take rise solely in the calculations of the understanding? Is it a paradox of my making, that ‘one murder makes a villain, millions a hero!’ Or is it not true that here, as in other cases, the enormity of the evil overpowers and makes a convert of the imagination by its very magnitude? You contradict my reasoning, because you know nothing of the question, and you think that no one has a right to understand what you do not. My offence against purity in the passage alluded to, ‘which contains the concentrated venom of my malignity,’ is, that I have admitted that there are tyrants and slaves abroad in the world; and you would hush the matter up, and pretend that there is no such thing, in order that there may be nothing else. Farther, I have explained the cause, the subtle sophistry of the human mind, that tolerates and pampers the evil, in order to guard against its approaches; you would conceal the cause in order to prevent the cure, and to leave the proud flesh about the heart to harden and ossify into one impenetrable mass of selfishness and hypocrisy, that we may not ‘sympathise in the distresses of suffering virtue’ in any case, in which they come in competition with the factitious wants and ‘imputed weaknesses of the great.’ You ask ‘are we gratified by the cruelties of Domitian or Nero?’ No, not we—they were too petty and cowardly to strike the imagination at a distance; but the Roman Senate tolerated them, addressed their perpetrators, exalted them into Gods, the Fathers of their people; they had pimps and scribblers of all sorts in their pay, their Senecas, etc. till a turbulent rabble thinking that there were no injuries to society greater than the endurance of unlimited and wanton oppression, put an end to the farce, and abated the nuisance as well as they could. Had you and I lived in those times, we should have been what we are now, I ‘a sour mal-content,’ and you ‘a sweet courtier.’ Your reasoning is ill put together; it wants sincerity, it wants ingenuity. To prove that I am wrong in saying that the love of power and heartless submission to it extend beyond the tragic stage to real life, to prove that there has been nothing heard but the shepherd’s pipe upon the mountain, and that the still sad music of humanity has never filled up the pauses to the thoughtful ear, you bring in illustration the cruelties of Domitian and Nero, whom you suppose to have been without flatterers, train-bearers, or executioners, and ‘the crimes of revolutionary France of a still blacker die,’ (a sentence which alone would have entitled you to a post of honour and secrecy under Sejanus,) which you suppose to have been without aiders or abettors. You speak of the horrors of Robespierre’s reign; (there you tread on velvet;) do you mean that these atrocities excited nothing but horror in revolutionary France, in undelivered France, in Paris, the centre and focus of anarchy and crime; or that the enthusiasm and madness with which they were acted and applauded, was owing to nothing but a long-deferred desire for truth and justice, and the collected vengeance of the human race? You do not mean this, for you never mean anything that has even an approximation to unfashionable truth in it. You add, ‘We cannot recollect, however, that these crimes were heard of with much satisfaction in this country.’ Then you have forgotten the years 1793 and 94, you have forgotten the addresses against republicans and levellers, you have forgotten Mr. Burke and his 80,000 incorrigible Jacobins.—‘Nor had we the misfortune to know any individual, (though we will not take upon us to deny that Mr. Hazlitt may have been of that description,)’ (I will take upon me to deny that) ‘who cried havoc, and enjoyed the atrocities of Robespierre and Carnot.’ Then at that time, Sir, you had not the good fortune to know Mr. Southey.[[84]]
To return, you find fault with my toleration of those pleasant persons, Lucio, Pompey, and Master Froth, in Measure for Measure, and with my use of the word ‘natural morality.’ And yet, ‘the word is a good word, being whereby a man may be accommodated.’ If Pompey was a common bawd, you, Sir, are a court pimp. That is artificial morality. ‘Go to, a feather turns the scale of your avoir-du-pois.’ I have also, it seems, erred in using the term moral in a way not familiar to you, as opposed to physical; and in that sense have applied it to the description of the mole on Imogen’s neck, ‘cinque-spotted, like the crimson drops i’ th’ bottom of a cowslip.’ I have stated that there is more than a physical—there is a moral beauty in this image, and I think so still, though you may not comprehend how.
You assert roundly that there is no such person as the black prince Morocchius,[[85]] in the Merchant of Venice. ‘He, (Mr. Hazlitt,) objects entirely to a personage of whom we never heard before, the black Prince Marocchius. With this piece of blundering ignorance, which, with a thousand similar instances of his intimate acquaintance with the poet, clearly prove that his enthusiasm for Shakespear is all affected, we conclude what we have to say of his folly; it remains to say a few words of his mischief.’ Vol. xxxiv. p. 463. I could not at first, Sir, comprehend your drift in this passage, and I can scarcely believe it yet. But I perceive that in Chalmers’s edition, the tawny suitor of Portia, who is called Morocchius in my common edition, goes by the style and title of Morocco. This important discovery proves, according to you, that my admiration of Shakespear is all affected, and that I can know nothing of the poet or his characters. So that the only title to admiration in Shakespear, not only in the Merchant of Venice, but in his other plays, all knowledge of his beauties, or proof of an intimate acquaintance with his genius, is confined to the alteration which Mr. Chalmers has adopted in the termination of the two last syllables of the name of this blackamoor, and his reading Morocco for Morocchius. Admirable grammarian, excellent critic! I do not wonder you think nothing of my Characters of Shakespear’s Plays, when I see what it is that you really admire and think worth the study in them. No, no, Mr. Gifford, you shall not persuade me by your broken English and ‘red-lattice phrases,’ that the only thing in Shakespear worth knowing, was the baptismal name of this Prince of Morocco, or that no one can admire the author’s plays out of Mr Chalmers’s edition, or find anything to admire even there, except the new nomenclature of the dramatis personæ. If this is not your meaning in the passage here quoted, I do not know what it is; if it is not, I have done you great injustice in supposing that it is, for I am sure it cannot mean anything else so foolish and contemptible. You had begun this curious paragraph by saying, that ‘I had run through my set of phrases, and was completely at a stand’; and you bring as a damning proof of this, a repetition of two phrases. Do you believe that I had filled 300 pages with the repetition of two phrases? ‘Go, go, you’re a censorious ill man.’
The deliberate hypocrisy of Regan and Gonerill, of which I spoke, I had explained in the sentence before by a periphrasis to mean their ‘hypocritical pretensions to virtue.’ If I had no right to use the word hastily in this absolute sense, you had still less to confound the meaning of a whole passage. Edmund is indeed ‘a hypocrite to his father; he is a hypocrite to his brother, and to Regan and Gonerill’; but he is not a hypocrite to himself. This is that consummation of hypocrisy of which I spoke, and of which you ought to know something.
I have commenced my observations on Lear, you say, with ‘an acknowledgment remarkable for its naiveté and its truth’; the import of which remarkable acknowledgment is, that I find myself incompetent to do justice to this tragedy, by any criticism upon it. This you construe into a ‘determination on my part to write nonsense’; you seem, Sir, to have sat down with a determination to write something worse than nonsense. As a proof of my having fulfilled the promise, (which I had not made,) you cite these words, ‘It is then the best of all Shakespear’s plays, for it is the one in which he was most in earnest‘; and add significantly, ‘Macbeth and Othello were mere jeux d’esprit, we presume.’ You may presume so, but not from what I have said. You only aim at being a word-catcher, and fail even in that. In like manner, you say, ‘If this means that we sympathise so much with the feelings and sentiments of Hamlet, that we identify ourselves with the character, we have to accuse Mr. Hazlitt of strangely misleading us a few pages back. “The moral of Othello comes directly home to the business and bosoms of men; the interest in Hamlet is more remote and reflex.” And yet it is we who are Hamlet.’—Yes, because we sympathise with Hamlet, in the way I have explained, and which you ought to have endeavoured at least to understand, as reflecting and moralising on the general distresses of human life, and not as particularly affected by those which come home to himself, as we see in Othello. You accuse me of stringing words together without meaning, and it is you who cannot connect two ideas together.
You call me ‘a poor cankered creature,’ ‘a trader in sedition,’ ‘a wicked sophist,’ and yet you would have it believed that I am ‘principally distinguished by an indestructible love of flowers and odours, and dews and clear waters, and soft airs and sounds and bright skies, and woodland solitudes and moonlight bowers.’[[86]] I do not understand how you reconcile such ‘welcome and unwelcome things,’ but anything will do to feed your spleen at another’s expence, when it is the person and not the thing you dislike. Thus you complain of my style, that it is at times figurative, at times poetical, at times familiar, not always the same flat dull thing that you would have it. You point out the omission of a line in a quotation from a well-known passage in Shakespear. You do not however think the detection of this omission is a sufficient proof of your sagacity, but you proceed to assign as a motive for it, ‘That I do it to improve the metre,’ which is ridiculous. You say I conjure up objections to Shakespear which nobody ever thought of, in order to answer them. The objection to Romeo and Juliet, which I have answered, was made by the late Mr. Curran, as well as the objection to the want of interest and action in Paradise Lost, which I have answered in another place.—‘Thus he endeavours to convince one class of critics, that the poet’s genius was not confined to the production of stage effect by supernatural means. In another place he expresses his astonishment that Shakespear should be considered as a gloomy writer, who painted nothing but gorgons, hydras, and chimeras dire.’ One of these classes of critics which, you say, ‘are phantoms of my own creating,’ comprehends the whole French nation, and the other the greatest part of the English with Dr. Johnson at their head, who in his Preface, ‘one of the most perfect pieces of criticism since the days of Quintilian’ (and which might have been written in the days of Quintilian just as well as in ours) has neglected to expatiate on Shakespear’s ‘indestructible love of flowers and odours, and woodland solitudes and moonlight bowers.’ You know nothing of Shakespear, nor of what is thought about him: you mind only the text of the commentators. With respect to Mr. Wordsworth’s Ode, which I have dragged into my account of Romeo and Juliet, I did not quarrel with the poetical conceit, but with the metaphysical doctrine founded upon it by his school. There is a difference between ‘ends of verse and sayings of philosophers.’ If Shakespear had been a great German transcendental philosopher (either at the first or second hand) his talking of the music of the spheres might have rendered him suspected. You compare my account of Hamlet to the dashing style of a showman: I think the showman’s speech is proper to a show, and mine to Hamlet. You, Sir, have no sympathy in common with Hamlet; nothing to make him seem ever ‘present to your mind’s eye’; no feeling to produce such an hallucination in your mind, nor to make you tolerate it in others. You are an Ultra-Crepidarian critic.
You laugh at my theory, that ‘Filch’s picking of pockets has ceased to be so good a jest as formerly,’ from the degeneracy of the age, that is, from the diminution of the practice, as at variance with the Police Report. Shortly after I had hazarded this piece of conjectural criticism, the Beggar’s Opera was hooted off the stage in America—because they have no Police Report there. I may have been premature in applying this conclusion from a highly advanced state of civilization, or from the degeneracy of the age we live in, to our own country.
What you say of my remarks on the use which Shakespear makes of the principal analogy in Cymbeline, and of contrast in Macbeth is beneath an answer. You should confine yourself to mere matters of verbal criticism. Thus you object to my use of the term ‘logical diagrams’ as unprecedented and barbarous: yet we talk of syllogising in mode and figure, and besides, the word has been made pretty malleable by Mr. Burke. What do you say to his talking of ‘the geometricians and chemists of France, bringing the one from the dry bones of their diagrams, and the other from the soot of their furnaces, dispositions worse than indifferent to common feelings and habitudes.’ Would you call this ‘slip-slop absurdity’? But to talk of the dry bones of diagrams, and escape with impunity from the censure of small critics, a man must assert that the king of this country ‘holds his crown in contempt of the choice of the people.’
I am obliged to you for informing me of the real name of the person who wrote the ingenious parallel between Richard the Third and Macbeth.
The article in the last Review on my Lectures on English Poetry, requires a very short notice.—You would gladly retract what you have said, but you dare not. You are a coward to public opinion and to your own. You begin by observing, ‘Mr. Hazlitt seems to have bound himself like Hannibal to wage everlasting war, not indeed against Rome, but against accurate reasoning, just observation, and precise, or even intelligible language.’ This might be true, if the opinion of the Quarterly Review were synonymous with accurate reasoning, just observation, and knowledge of language. ‘We have traced him in his two former predatory excursions on taste and common sense. Had he written on any other subject, we should scarcely have thought of watching his movements.’ You were ‘principally excited to notice’ the Round Table by some political heresies which had crept into it: you ‘condescended to notice’ the Characters of Shakespear’s Plays, ‘to shew how small a portion of talent and literature was necessary to carry on the trade of sedition.’ You have been tempted to watch my movements in the present work to shew how little talent and literature is necessary to write a popular work on poetry. ‘But though his book is dull, his theme is pleasing, and interests in spite of the author. As we read, we forget Mr. Hazlitt, to think of those concerning whom he writes.’ Do you think, Sir, that a higher compliment could come from you?
It would neither be for my credit nor your own, that I should follow you in detail through your abortive attempts to deny me exactly those qualifications which you feel conscious that I possess, or afraid that others will ascribe to me. You are already bankrupt of your word, nor can I be admitted as an evidence in my own case. You say that I am utterly without originality, without a power of illustration, or language to make myself understood!—I shall leave it to the public to judge between us. There is one objection however which you make to me which is singular enough: viz. that I quote Shakespear. I can only answer, that ‘I would not change that vice for your best virtue.’ ‘If a trifling thing is to be told, he will not mention it in common language: he must give it, if possible, in words which the Bard of Avon has somewhere used. Were the beauty of the applications conspicuous, we might forget or at least forgive, the deformity produced by the constant stitching in of these patches‘—[i.e. by the beauty of the applications]. ‘Unfortunately, however, the phrases thus obtruded upon us seem to be selected, not on account of any intrinsic beauty, but merely because they are fantastic and unlike what would naturally occur to an ordinary writer.’ Certainly, Sir, your style is very different from Shakespear’s. I observe in your notes to the Baviad and Mæviad, you diversify your matter by frequently quoting Greek.—Now it appears to me that these quotations of your’s add to the wit only by varying the type. If these learned patches ‘plagued the Cruscas and Lauras,’ my quotations have given other people ‘the horrors’!
You quote my definition of poetry, and say that it is not a definition of anything, because it is completely unintelligible. To prove this, you take one word which occurs in it, and is no way important, the word sympathy, which you tell us has two significations, one anatomical, and the other moral; and poetry, according to you, ‘has no skill in surgery or ethics.’ I do not think this shews a want of clearness in my definition, but a want of good faith or understanding in you.
You say that I get at a number of extravagant conclusions ‘by means sufficiently simple and common. He employs the term poetry in three distinct meanings, and his legerdemain consists in substituting one of these for the other. Sometimes it is the general appellation of a certain class of compositions, as when he says that poetry is graver than history. Secondly, it denotes the talent by which these compositions are produced; and it is in this sense that he calls poetry that fine particle within us, which produces in our being rarefaction, expansion, elevation and purification.’ [This is Mr. Gifford’s academic style, not mine.] ‘Thirdly, it denotes the subjects of which these compositions treat. It is in this meaning that he uses the term, when he says that all that is worth remembering in life is the poetry of it; that fear is poetry, that hope is poetry, that love is poetry; and in the very same sense he might assert that fear is sculpture and painting and music; that the crimes of Verres are the eloquence of Cicero, and the poetry of Milton the criticism of Mr. Hazlitt.’ It is true I have used the word poetry in the three senses above imputed to me, and I have done so, because the word has these three distinct meanings in the English language, that is, it signifies the composition produced, the state of mind or faculty producing it, and, in certain cases, the subject-matter proper to call forth that state of mind. Your objection amounts to this, that in reasoning on a difficult question I write common English, and this is the whole secret of my extravagance and obscurity.—Do you mean that the distinguishing between the compositions of poetry, the talent for poetry, or the subject-matter of poetry, would have told us what poetry is? This is what you would say, or you have no meaning at all. I have expressly treated the subject according to this very division, and I have endeavoured to define that common something which belongs to these several views of it, and determines us in the application of the same common name, viz. an unusual vividness in external objects or in our immediate impressions, exciting a movement of imagination in the mind, and leading by natural association or sympathy to harmony of sound and the modulation of verse in expressing it. This is what you, Sir, cannot understand. I could not ‘assert in the same sense that fear is sculpture and painting, etc.’ because this would be an abuse of the English language: we talk of the poetry of painting, etc. which could not be, if poetry was confined to the technical sense of ‘lines in ten syllables.’ The crimes of Verres, I also grant, were not the same thing as the eloquence of Cicero, though I suspect you confound the crimes of revolutionary France with Mr. Pitt’s speeches; and as to Milton’s poetry and my criticisms, there is almost as much difference between them as between Milton’s poetry and your verses. You say, ‘the principal subjects of which poetry treats, are the passions and affections of mankind; we are all under the influence of our passions and affections, that is, in Mr. Hazlitt’s new language, we all act on the principles of poetry, and are in truth all poets. We all exert our muscles and limbs, therefore we are anatomists and surgeons; we have teeth which we employ in chewing, therefore we are dentists,’ etc. Not at all; we are all poets, inasmuch as we are under the influence of the passions and imagination, that is, as we have certain common feelings, and undergo the same process of mind with the poet, who only expresses in a particular manner what he and all feel alike; but in exerting our muscles, we do not dissect them; in chewing with our teeth, we do not perform the part of dentists, etc. There is nothing parallel in the two cases. ‘You anticipate,’ you say, ‘these brilliant conclusions for me’; and do not perceive the difference between the extension of a logical principle, and an abuse of common language.—You proceed, ‘As another specimen of his definitions, we may take the following. “Poetry does not define the limits of sense, nor analyse the distinctions of the understanding, but signifies the excess of the imagination beyond the actual or ordinary impression of any object or feeling.” Poetry was at the beginning of the book asserted to be an impression; it is now the excess of the imagination beyond an impression; what this excess is we cannot tell, but at least it must be something very unlike an impression.’ Poetry at the beginning of the book was asserted to be not simply an impression, ‘but an impression by its vividness exciting an involuntary movement of the imagination: now, you say it is the excess of the imagination beyond an impression; and you bring this as a proof of a contradiction in terms. An impression, by its vividness exciting a movement of the imagination, you discover, must be something very unlike an impression, and as to the imagination itself, you cannot tell what it is; it is an unknown power in your poetical creed. What is most extraordinary is, that you had quoted the very passage which you here represent as a total contradiction to the latter, only two pages before. What, Sir, do you think of your readers? What must they think of you!—‘Though the total want of meaning,’ you add, ‘is the weightiest objection to such writing, yet the abuse which it involves of particular words and phrases’ (in addition to a total want of meaning) ‘is very remarkable,’ (it must be so,) ‘and will not be overlooked by those who are aware of the inseparable connexion between justness of thought and precision of language.’ (You are not aware that there is no precise measure of thought or expression.) ‘What, in strict reasoning, can be meant by the impression of a feeling?’ (The impression which it makes on the mind, as distinct from some other to which it gives birth, is what I meant.) ‘How can actual and ordinary be used as synonymous?’ (They are not.) ‘Every impression must be an actual impression’; (there is then no such thing as an imaginary impression;) ‘and the use of that epithet annihilates the limitations which Mr. Hazlitt meant’ (in the total want of all meaning,) ‘to guard his proposition.’ We must speak by the card, or equivocation will undo us. You say, ‘you have not the faintest conception of what I mean by the heavenly bodies returning on the squares of the distances or on Dr. Chalmers’s Discourses.’ Nor will I tell you what I meant. A knavish speech sleeps in a fool’s ear. ‘As to the assertion that there can never be another Jacob’s dream, we see no reason why dreams should be scientific.’ Shakespear says, that dreams ‘denote a foregone conclusion.’ You quote what I say of Swift, and misrepresent it. ‘Mr. Hazlitt’s doctrine, therefore, is, that the inability to become mad, is very likely to drive a man mad.’ My doctrine is, that the inability to get rid of a favourite idea, when constantly thwarted, or of the impression of any object, however painful, merely because it is true, is likely to drive a man mad. It is this tenaciousness on a particular point that almost always destroys the general coherence of the understanding. I do not say that the inability to get rid of the distinction between right and wrong continued in Swift’s mind after he was mad—I say it contributed to drive him mad. I mean that a sense of great injustice often produces madness in individual cases, and that a strong sense of general injustice, and an abstracted view of human nature such as it is, compared with what it ought to be, is likely to produce the same effect in a mind like that of the author of Gulliver’s Travels. Do you understand yet? You do not go into my general character of Swift, which might have drawn you into something of a wider field of speculation; and you pick out a straggling sentence or two to cavil at in my account of Pope, of Chaucer, of Milton, and Shakespear, on which you are glad to discharge the gall that has been accumulating in your mind for several pages. If you think by this means, to put me or the public out of conceit with my writings, you have mistaken the matter entirely. You can only put down my arguments by meeting them fairly, or my style, by writing better than you do.
‘We occasionally,’ you proceed, ‘discover a faint semblance of connected thinking in Mr. Hazlitt’s pages; but wherever this is the case, his reasoning is for the most part incorrect.’ This is a curious inference. ‘This faint semblance of connected thinking,’ is, it appears, when I maintain some opinion, which is ‘a sprout from some popular doctrine’; but if I push it a little farther than you were aware of, my reasoning becomes incorrect. Thus it has been a popular doctrine with some critics, (which yet you do not admit)—‘That the progress of science is unfavourable to the culture of the imagination. It is no doubt true, that the individual who devotes his labour to the investigation of abstract truth, must acquire habits of thought very different from those which the exercise of the fancy demands.’ You add in italics, ‘the cause lies in the exclusive appropriation of his time to reasoning, and not in the logical accuracy with which he reasons.’ Whenever I have any discovery to communicate, which I think you cannot comprehend, I will in future put it in italics, to make it equally profound and clear. It appears by you, that the incompatibility between the successful pursuit of different studies does not arise from anything incompatible in the studies themselves, but from the time devoted to each. The mind is equally incapacitated from passing from one to the other, whether they are the most opposite or the most alike. The dreams of alchemy, and the schemes of astrology, the traditional belief in the doctrine of ghosts and fairies, though made up almost entirely of imagination, self-will, superstition and romance, were not a jot more favourable to the caprices and fanciful exaggerations of poetry, either in the public mind, or in that of individuals, than the modern system which excludes (both by the logical accuracy with which it proceeds, and a constant appeal to demonstrable facts), every alloy of passion, and all exercise of the imagination. You should never put your thoughts in italics. If I were to attempt a character of verbal critics, I should be apt to say, that their habits of mind disqualify them for general reasoning or fair discussion: that they are furious about trifles, because they have nothing else to interest them; that they have no way of giving dignity to their insignificant discoveries, but by treating those who have missed them with contempt; that they are dogmatical and conceited, in proportion as they have little else to guide them in their quaint researches but caprice and accident; that the want of intellectual excitement gives birth to increasing personal irritability, and endless petty altercation. You, Sir, would make all this self-evident, by the help of italics, and say, that the cause lies not in anything in the nature of verbal criticism, but the exclusive appropriation of their time to it.
You next run foul of my account of the pleasure derived from tragedy. You are afraid to understand what I say on any subject, and it is not therefore likely you should ever detect what is erroneous in it. I have shewn by a reference to facts, and to the authority of Mr. Burke (whom you would rather contradict than believe me) that the objects which are supposed to please only in fiction, please in reality; that ‘if there were known to be a public execution of some state criminal in the next street, the theatre would soon be empty’—that therefore the pleasure derived from tragedy is not anything peculiar to it, as poetry or fiction; but has its ground in the common love of strong excitement. You say, I have misstated the fact, to give a false view of the question, which, according to you, is ‘why that which is painful in itself, pleases in works of fiction.’ I answer, I have shewn that this is not a fair statement of the question, by stating the fact, that what is painful in itself, pleases not the sufferer indeed, but the spectator, in reality as well as in works of fiction. The common proverb proves it—‘What is sport to one, is death to another.’
You observe, that ‘Some lines I have quoted from Chaucer, are very pleasing—
——“Emelie that fayrer was to sene
Than is the lilie upon his stalke grene,
And fresher than the May with floures newe:
For with the rose-colour strove hire hewe;
I n’ot which was the finer of hem too.”
‘But surely the beauty does not lie in the last line, though it is with this that Mr. Hazlitt is chiefly struck. “This scrupulousness” he observes, “about the literal preference, as if some question of matter of fact were at issue, is remarkable.”’
That is, I am not chiefly struck with the beauty of the last line, but with its peculiarity as characteristic of Chaucer. The beauty of the former lines might be in Spenser: the scrupulous exactness of the latter could be found nowhere but in Chaucer. I had said just before, that this poet ‘introduces a sentiment or a simile, as if it were given in upon evidence.’ I bring this simile as an instance in point, and you say I have not brought it to prove something else.
You charge me with misrepresenting Longinus, and prove that I have not. The word ἐναγώνιον signifies not as you are pleased to paraphrase it ‘vehemently energetic,’ but simply ‘full of contests.’ Must the Greek language be new-fangled, to prove that I am ignorant of it?
The only mistake you are able to point out, is a slip of the pen, which you will find to have been corrected long ago in the second edition.—Your pretending to say that Dr. Johnson was an admirer of Milton’s blank verse, is not a slip of the pen—you know he was not. There is as little sincerity in your concluding paragraph. You would ascribe what little appearance of thought there is in my writings to a confusion of images, and what appearance there is of imagination to a gaudy phraseology. If I had neither words nor ideas, I should be a profound philosopher and critic. How fond you are of reducing every one else to your own standard of excellence!
I have done what I promised. You complain of the difficulty of remembering what I write; possibly this Letter will prove an exception. There is a train of thought in your own mind, which will connect the links together: and before you again undertake to run down a writer for no other reason, than that he is of an opposite party to yourself, you will perhaps recollect that your wilful artifices and shallow cunning, though they pass undetected, will hardly screen you from your own contempt, nor, when once exposed, will the gratitude of your employers save you from public scorn.
Your conduct to me is no new thing: it is part of a system which has been regularly followed up for many years. Mr. Coleridge, in his Literary Life, has the following passage to shew the treatment which he and his friends received from your predecessor, the editor of the Anti-Jacobin Review.—‘I subjoin part of a note from the Beauties of the Anti-Jacobin, in which having previously informed the public that I had been dishonoured at Cambridge for preaching Deism, at a time when for my youthful ardour in defence of Christianity I was decried as a bigot by the proselytes of French philosophy, the writer concludes with these words—“Since this time he has left his native country, commenced citizen of the world, left his poor children fatherless, and his wife destitute. Ex hoc disce his friends, Lamb and Southey.” With severest truth,’ continues Mr. Coleridge, ‘it may be asserted that it would not be easy to select two men more exemplary in their domestic affections than those whose names were thus printed at full length, as in the same rank of morals with a denounced infidel and fugitive, who had left his children fatherless, and his wife destitute! Is it surprising that many good men remained longer than perhaps they otherwise would have done, adverse to a party which encouraged and openly rewarded the authors of such atrocious calumnies?’
With me, I confess, the wonder does not lie there:—all I am surprised at is, that the objects of these atrocious calumnies were ever reconciled to the authors of them and their patrons. Doubtless, they had powerful arts of conversion in their hands, who could with impunity and in triumph take away by atrocious calumnies the characters of all who disdained to be their tools; and rewarded with honours, places, and pensions all those who were. It is in this manner, Sir, that some of my old friends have become your new allies and associates.—They have changed sides, not I; and the proof that I have been true to the original ground of quarrel is, that I have you against me. Your consistency is the undeniable pledge of their tergiversation. The instinct of self-interest and meanness of servility are infallible and safe; it is speculative enthusiasm and disinterested love of public good, that being the highest strain of humanity, are apt to falter, and ‘dying, make a swan-like end.’ This tendency to change was, in the case of our poetical reformists, precipitated by another cause. The spirit of poetry is, as I believe, favourable to liberty and humanity, but not when its aid is most wanted, in encountering the shocks and disappointments of the world. Poetry may be described as having the range of the universe; it traverses the empyrean, and looks down on nature from a higher sphere. When it lights upon the earth, it loses some of its dignity and its use. Its strength is in its wings; its element is the air. Standing on its feet, jostling with the crowd, it is liable to be overthrown, trampled on, and defaced; for its wings are of a dazzling brightness, ‘sky-tinctured,’ and the least soil upon them shews to disadvantage. Sullied, degraded as I have seen it, I shall not here insult over it, but leave it to Time to take out the stains, seeing it is a thing immortal as itself. ‘Being so majestical, I should do it wrong to offer it but the shew of violence.’—The reason why I have not changed my principles with some of the persons here alluded to, is, that I had a natural inveteracy of understanding which did not bend to fortune or circumstances. I was not a poet, but a metaphysician; and I suspect that the conviction of an abstract principle is alone a match for the prejudices of absolute power. The love of truth is the best foundation for the love of liberty. In this sense, I might have repeated—
‘Love is not love that alteration finds:
Oh! no, it is an everfixed mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken.’
Besides, I had another reason. I owed something to truth, for she had done something for me. Early in life I had made (what I thought) a metaphysical discovery; and after that, it was too late to think of retracting. My pride forbad it: my understanding revolted at it. I could not do better than go on as I had begun. I too, worshipped at no unhallowed shrine, and served in no mean presence. I had laid my hand on the ark, and could not turn back! I have been called ‘a writer of third-rate books.’ For myself, there is no work of mine which I should rate so high, except one, which I dare say you never heard of—An Essay on the Principles of Human Action. I do not think the worse of it on that account; nor though you might not be able to understand it, could you attribute this to the gaudiness of the phraseology, nor the want of thought. I will here, Sir, explain the nature of the argument as clearly and in as few words as I can.
The object of that Essay (and I have written this Letter partly to introduce it through you to the notice of the reader) is to leave free play to the social affections, and to the cultivation of the more disinterested and generous principles of our nature, by removing a stumbling-block which has been thrown in their way, and which turns the very idea of virtue or humanity into a fable, viz. the metaphysical doctrine of the innate and necessary selfishness of the human mind. Do you understand so far? The question I propose to examine is not the practical question, how far man is more or less selfish or social in the actual sum-total of his habits and affections, nor the moral or political question, to what degree of perfection he can be advanced still further in the one, or weaned from the other; but my intention is to state and answer the previous question, whether there is, as it has been contended, a total incapacity and physical impossibility in the human mind, of feeling an interest in anything beyond itself, so that both the common feelings of compassion, natural affection, friendship, etc. and the more refined and abstracted ones of the love of justice, of country, or of kind, are, and must be a delusion, believed in only by fools, and turned to their advantage by knaves. This doctrine which has been sedulously and confidently maintained by the French and English metaphysicians of the two last centuries, by Hobbes, Mandeville, Rochefoucault, Helvetius and others, and is a principal corner-stone of what is called the modern philosophy, I think tends to, and has done a great deal of mischief, and I believe I have found out a view of the subject, which gets rid of it unanswerably and for ever, in manner and form following. I conceive, that to establish the doctrine of exclusive and absolute selfishness on a metaphysical basis, that is to say, on the original and impassable distinction of the faculties of the human mind, it is necessary to make it appear, that there is some peculiar and abstracted principle which gives it an immediate, mechanical, and irresistible interest in whatever relates to itself, and which by the same rule shuts out and is a bar to the very possibility of our feeling not an equal, but any kind or degree of interest whatever, at any moment of our lives, in the history and fate of others. This is so far from being true, that the contrary is demonstrable. Thus, Sir, My self-interest in anything signifies (by the statement) the particular manner in which whatever relates to myself affects me, so as to create an anxiety about it, and be a motive to action. Now the same word, self, is indifferently applied to the whole of my being, past, present, and to come; and it is supposed from the use of language and the habitual association of ideas, that this self is one thing as well as one word, and my interest in it all along the same necessary, identical interest. That a man must love himself as such, seems a self-evident and simple proposition. The idea appears like an absolute truth, and resists every attempt at analysis, like an element in nature. Some persons, who formerly took the pains to read this work, imagined (do not be alarmed, Sir!) that I wanted to argue them out of their own existence, merely because I endeavoured to define the nature and meaning of this word, self; to take in pieces, by metaphysical aid, this fine illusion of the brain and forgery of language, and to shew what there is real, and what false in it. The word denotes, by common consent, three different selves, my past, my present, and my future self. Now it is taken for granted by some, and insisted upon by others, that I must have the same unavoidable interest in all these, because they are all equally myself. But that is impossible; for in truth my personal identity is founded only on my personal consciousness, and that does not extend beyond the present moment.—It must be maintained, on the other side of the question, that my past, my present, and my future self are inseparably linked together, equally identified by an intimate communion of transferable thoughts and feelings in one metaphysical principle of self-interest, before they can be equally myself, the same identical thing, to any purpose of sentiment or for any motive of action. It will easily be seen how far this is the case, and how far it is not. I have a peculiar, exclusive self-interest or sympathy (never mind the word, Sir,) with my present self, by means of sensation (or consciousness), and with my past self, by means of memory, which I have not, and cannot have with the past or present feelings or interests of others; for this reason that these faculties are exclusive, peculiar, and confined to myself. But I have no exclusive, or peculiar, or independent faculty, like sensation or memory, giving me the same absolute, unavoidable, instinctive interest in my own future sensations, and none at all in those of others. This ideal self is then nominally the same, but strictly different; composed of distinct and unequal parts; bound together by laws and principles which have no parity of relation to each other. By shewing how personal identity produces self-interest as far as it goes, we shall see exactly when and how it ceases.—If I touch a burning coal, this gives me a present sensation differing in kind and degree from any impression I can receive from the same sensation being inflicted on another: there is no communication between another’s nerves and my brain producing a correspondent jar and magnetic sympathy of frame. Again, if I have suffered a pain of this sort in time past, this leaves traces in my mind, by my continued identity with myself, or by means of memory, of a kind totally distinct from any conception I can form of the same pain inflicted a year ago (for instance) on another. These two important faculties then give me an appropriate and exclusive interest only in what happens or has happened to myself. So far as the operation of these two faculties goes, I am strictly a selfish being, I am necessarily cut off from all knowledge of or sympathy with the feelings of any one but myself. But if I am to undergo a certain pain at a future time, the next year or the next moment, however near or remote, I have no faculty impressing this feeling intuitively and with mechanical force and certainty on my mind beforehand, as my present or past impressions are stamped upon it by means of sensation and memory. I have no principle of thought or sentiment in the original conformation of my mind, projecting me forward into my future being, giving me a present unavoidable consciousness of it, and removed from all cognisance of what happens to others; I have no faculty identifying my future interests inseparably with my present feelings, and therefore I have no exclusive, mechanical and proper self-interest in them, merely because they are mine: for that which is mine, is that which touches me by secret springs, and in a way in which what relates to others can take no hold of me. The only faculty by which I can anticipate what is to befal myself in future, is the same common and disposable faculty in kind and in mode of operation, by which I can, I do, and must anticipate in degree, and more or less according to circumstances, the feelings and thoughts of others, and take a proportionable interest in them, viz. the Imagination. To suppose that there is a principle of self-interest in the mind, without a faculty of self-interest, is an absurdity and a contradiction. This idea of an abstract, exclusive, metaphysical self-interest in my own being generally, is taken (by a gross and blind prejudice) from the manner in which the faculties of sensation and memory affect me, and applied to a part of my being, where I have no such interest in myself, because I have no such faculty giving it me. What proves that there is no mechanical sympathy identifying my future with my present being, is, that I am for the most part, indifferent to, ignorant of what is to happen to myself hereafter. There is no presentiment in the case. If the house is about to fall on my head, this occasions no uneasiness to my self-love, unless there are circumstances to alarm my imagination beforehand. To suppose, that besides the ideal or rational interest I have in the event, I have another real metaphysical interest in it, without object or consciousness, is as if I should say, that I have a particular interest in the past, without remembering it, or in the present without feeling it.—But the future is the only subject of action, that is, of a practical or rational interest at all, either of self-love or benevolence. All voluntary action, that is, all action undertaken with a view to produce a certain event or the contrary, must relate to the future. The primary, essential motive of the volition of anything must be the idea of that thing, and the idea solely. For the thing itself, which is the object of desire and pursuit, is by the supposition a nonentity. It is willed for that very reason, that it is supposed not to exist. If it did exist, or had existed, it would be absurd to will it to exist or not to exist; and as a thing which does not exist, but which we will to be or not to be, it is a mere fiction of the mind, and can exert no power over the thoughts, nor influence the will or the affections in any way, except through the imagination. The future, whether as it relates to myself or others, exists only in the mind; and in the mind, not by memory, not by sensation, which are exclusive and selfish faculties, but by the imagination, which is not a limited, narrow faculty, but common, discursive, and social. If my sympathy with others is not a sensible substantial mechanical interest, neither is my self-interest anything but an imaginary and ideal one, I am bound to my future interest only by the same fine links of fancy and reason, which give that of others a hold on my affections. As a voluntary agent, I am necessarily, and in the first instance, that is, in the metaphysical sense of the question, a disinterested one. I could not love myself, if I were not so formed, as to be capable of loving others. I have no solid, material, gross, actual self-interest in my own future welfare, and I therefore can only have the same airy, notional, hypothetical interest in it, which I must have in kind, though not in degree, in the pleasures and pains of others, which I get at the knowledge of and sympathise with in the same way. There is then no exclusive ground of self-interest, incompatible with sympathy, and rendering it a chimera; self-love and sympathy both rest on the same general ground of reason, of imagination, and of common sense.—It may be said, that my own future interests have a reality beyond the mere idea. So have the interests of others, and the only question is, whether the sympathy, the motive to action, is not equally imaginary in both cases. It may be said, that I shall become my future self, but that is no reason why I should take a particular interest in it till I do. If a pin pricks me in any part of my body, I am instantly apprised of it, and feel an interest in removing it; but my future self does not find any means of apprising me of its sensations, in which I can feel no interest, except from previous apprehension. Lastly, it may be said that I do feel an interest in myself and my future welfare, which I do not, and cannot feel in that of others. This I grant; but that does not prove a metaphysical antecedent self-interest, precluding the possibility of all interest in others, (for the social affections are as much a matter of fact, as the influence of self-love) but a practical self-interest, arising out of habit and circumstances, and more or less consistent with other disinterested and humane feelings, according to habit, opinion, and circumstances. I love myself better than my neighbour, for the same reason (and for no other) that I love my child better than a stranger’s—from having my thoughts more fixed upon its welfare, my time more taken up in providing for it, and from my knowing better by experience, what its wants and wishes are. People have accounted for natural affection as an innate idea, as they have for self-love. According to the metaphysical doctrine of selfishness, my own child or a stranger’s, and every one else, are equally and perfectly indifferent to me, as much as if they were mere machines. As to a paramount universal abstract notion of personal identity, impelling and overruling all my actions, thoughts, feelings, etc. to one sole object, and centre of self-interest, there is no such thing in nature. It requires almost as much pains and discipline, to make us attentive to our own real and permanent happiness, as to that of others. Is it not the constant theme of moralists and divines, that man is the sport of impulse, and the creature of habit? I would ask, whether the convivialist is deterred from indulging in his love of the bottle, by any consideration of the ruin of his health or business? Is the debauchee restrained in the career of his passions, any more by reflecting on the disgrace or probable diseases he is bringing on himself, than on the injury he does to others? It would be as hard a task to make the spendthrift prudent, as the miser generous. Man is governed by his passions, and not by his interest.—The selfish theory is founded on mixing up vulgar prejudices, and scholastic distinctions; and by being insisted on, tends to debase the mind, and not at all promote the cause of truth.
I do not think I should illustrate the foregoing reasoning so well by anything I could add on the subject, as by relating the manner in which it first struck me. I remember I had been reading a speech which Mirabaud (the author of the work, called the System of Nature) has put into the mouth of a supposed infidel at the day of Judgment; and was afterwards led on by some means or other, to consider the question, whether it could properly be said to be an act of virtue in any one to sacrifice his own final happiness to that of any other person, or number of persons, if it were possible for the one ever to be made the price of the other. Suppose it be my own case—that it were in my power to save twenty other persons, by voluntarily consenting to suffer for them, why should I not do a generous thing, and never trouble myself about what might be the consequences to myself thousands of years hence? Now the reason, I thought, why a man should prefer his own future welfare to that of others, was, that he has a necessary, or abstract interest in the one, which he cannot have in the other, and this again is the consequence of his being always the same individual, of his continued identity with himself. The distinction is this, that however insensible I may be to my own interest at any future period, yet when the time comes, I shall feel very differently about it. I shall then judge of it from the actual impression of the object, that is, truly and certainly; and as I shall still be conscious of my past feelings, and shall bitterly repent my own folly and insensibility, I ought, as a rational agent, to be determined now by what I shall then wish I had done, when I shall feel the consequences of my actions most deeply and sensibly. It is this continued consciousness of my own feelings which gives me an immediate interest in whatever relates to my future welfare, and makes me at all times accountable to myself for my own conduct. As therefore this consciousness will be renewed in me after death, if I exist again at all—But stop——As I must be conscious of my past feelings to be myself, and as this conscious being will be myself, how, if that consciousness should be transferred to some other being? How am I to know that I am not imposed upon by a false claim of identity? But that is impossible, because I shall have no other self than that which arises from this very consciousness. Why then, if so, this self may be multiplied in as many different beings as the Deity may think proper to endue with the same consciousness, which, if it can be renewed by an act of omnipotence in any one instance, may clearly be so in a hundred others. Am I to regard all these as equally myself? Am I equally interested in the fate of all? Or if I must fix upon some one of them in particular as my representative and other self, how am I to be determined in my choice?——Here then I saw an end to my speculations about absolute self-interest and personal identity. I saw plainly, that the consciousness of my own feelings, which is made the foundation of my continued interest in them, could not extend to what had never been, and might never be, that my identity with myself must be confined to the connection between my past and present being, that with respect to my future feelings and interests they could have no communication with, or influence over my present feelings and interests, merely because they were future, that I shall be hereafter affected by the recollection of my former feelings and actions, and my remorse be equally heightened by reflecting on my past folly, and late-earned wisdom, whether I am really the same thinking being, or have only the same consciousness renewed in me; but that to suppose that this remorse can re-act in the reverse order on my present feelings, or create an immediate interest in my future feelings before it exists, is an express contradiction. For, how can this pretended unity of consciousness which is only reflected from the past, which makes me so little acquainted with the future, that I cannot even tell for a moment how long it will be continued, whether it will be entirely interrupted by, or renewed in me after death, and which might be multiplied in I don’t know how many different beings, and prolonged by complicated sufferings, without my being any the wiser for it; how, I ask, can a principle of this sort transfuse my present into my future being, and make me as much a participator in what does not at all affect me as if it were actually impressed upon my senses? I cannot, therefore, have a principle of active self-interest arising out of the connexion between my future and present being, for no such connexion exists or is possible. I am what I am in spite of the future. My feelings, actions, and interests are determined by causes already existing and acting, and cannot depend on anything else, without a complete transposition of the order in which effects follow one another in nature.
In this manner, Sir, may a man learn to distinguish the limits which circumscribe his identity with himself, and the frail tenure on which he holds his fleeting existence. Here indeed, ‘on this bank and shoal of time,’ we give ourselves credit for a few years, and so far make sure of our continued identity—as far as we can see the horizon before us, while the same busy scene exists, while the same objects, passions, and pursuits engross our attention, we seem to grasp the realities of things; they are incorporated with our imagination and take hold of our affections, and we cannot doubt of our interest in them. Farther than this, we do not go with the same confidence; the indistinctness of another state of being takes away its reality, and we lose the abstract idea of self for want of objects to attach it to. But the reasoning is the same in both cases. The next year, the next hour, the next moment is but a creation of the mind; in all that we hope or fear, love or hate, in all that is nearest and dearest to us, we but mistake the strength of illusion for certainty, and follow the mimic shews of things and catch at a shadow and live in a waking dream. Everything before us exists in an ideal world. The future is a blank and dreary void, like sleep or death, till the imagination brooding over it with wings outspread, impregnates it with life and motion. The forms and colours it assumes are but the pictures reflected on the eye of fancy, the unreal mockeries of future events. The solid fabric of time and nature moves on, but the future always flies before it. The present moment stands on the brink of nothing. We cannot pass the dread abyss, or make a broad and beaten way over it, or construct a real interest in it, or identify ourselves with what is not, or have a being, sense, and motion, where there are none. Our interest in the future, our identity with it, cannot be substantial; that self which we project before us into it is like a shadow in the water, a bubble of the brain. In becoming the blind and servile drudges of self-interest, we bow down before an idol of our own making, and are spell-bound by a name. Those objects to which we are most attached, make no part of our present sensations or real existence; they are fashioned out of nothing, and rivetted to our self-love by the force of a reasoning imagination, (the privilege of our intellectual nature)—and it is the same faculty that carries us out of ourselves as well as beyond the present moment, that pictures the thoughts, passions and feelings of others to us, and interests us in them, that clothes the whole possible world with a borrowed reality, that breathes into all other forms the breath of life, and endows our sympathies with vital warmth, and diffuses the soul of morality through all the relations and sentiments of our social being.
Such, Sir, is the metaphysical discovery of which I spoke; and which I made many years ago. From that time I felt a certain weight and tightness about my heart taken off, and cheerful and confident thoughts springing up in the place of anxious fears and sad forebodings. The plant I had sown and watered with my tears, grew under my eye; and the air about it was wholesome and pleasant. For this cause it is, that I have gone on little discomposed by other things, by good or adverse fortune, by good or ill report, more hurt by public disappointments than my own, and not thrown into the hot or cold fits of a tertian ague; as the Edinburgh or Quarterly Review damps or raises the opinion of the town in my favour. I have some love of fame, of the fame of a Pascal, a Leibnitz, or a Berkeley (none at all of popularity) and would rather that a single inquirer after truth should pronounce my name, after I am dead, with the same feelings that I have thought of theirs, than be puffed in all the newspapers, and praised in all the reviews, while I am living. I myself have been a thinker; and I cannot but believe that there are and will be others, like me. If the few and scattered sparks of truth, which I have been at so much pains to collect, should still be kept alive in the minds of such persons, and not entirely die with me, I shall be satisfied.
I am, Sir,
Yours, etc.
William Hazlitt.
End of A Letter to William Gifford.