ON THE SPIRIT OF PARTISANSHIP
| The London Magazine.] | [December, 1821. |
I have in my time known few thorough partisans; at least on my own side of the question. I conceive, however, that the honestest and strongest-minded men have been so. In general, interest, fear, vanity, the love of contradiction, even a scrupulous regard to truth and justice, come to divert them from the popular cause. It is a character that requires very opposite and almost incompatible qualities—reason and prejudice, a passionate attachment founded on an abstract idea. He who can take up a speculative question, and pursue it with the same zeal and unshaken constancy that he does his immediate interests or private animosities, he who is as faithful to his principles as he is to himself, is the true partisan. I do not here speak of the bigot, or the mercenary or cowardly tool of a party. There are plenty of this description of persons (a considerable majority of the inhabitants of every country)—who are ‘ever strong upon the stronger side,’ staunch, thorough-paced sticklers for their passions and prejudices, and who stand by their party as long as their party can stand by them. I speak of those who espouse a cause from liberal motives and with liberal views, and of the obstacles that are so often found to relax their perseverance or impair their zeal. These may, I think, be reduced chiefly to the heads of obligations to friends, of vanity, or the desire of the lead and distinction, to an over-squeamish delicacy in regard to appearances, to fickleness of purpose, or to natural timidity and weakness of nerve.
There is nothing more contemptible than party spirit in one point of view; and yet it seems inseparable in practice from public principle. You cannot support measures unless you support men;—you cannot carry any point or maintain any system, without acting in concert with others. In theory, it is all very well. We may refine in our distinctions, and elevate our language to what point we please. But in carrying the most sounding words and stateliest propositions into effect, we must make use of the instrumentality of men; and some of the alloy and imperfection of the means may insinuate itself into the end. If we do not go all lengths with those who are embarked with us in the same views; if we are not hearty in the defence of their interests and motives; if we are not fully in their confidence and they in ours; if we do not ingraft on the stock of public virtue the charities and sentiments of private affection and esteem; if the bustle and anxiety and irritation of the state-affairs do not kindle into the glow of friendship as well as patriotism; if we look distant, suspicious, lukewarm at one another; if we criticise, carp at, pry into the conduct of our party with watchful, jealous eyes; it is to be feared we shall play the game into the enemy’s hands, and not co-operate together for the common good with all the steadiness and cordiality that might be wished. On the other hand, if we lend ourselves to the foibles and weaknesses of our friends; if we suffer ourselves to be implicated in their intrigues, their scrambles and bargainings for place and power; if we flatter their mistakes, and not only screen them from the eyes of others, but are blind to them ourselves; if we compromise a great principle in the softness of a womanish friendship; if we entangle ourselves in needless family-ties; if we sell ourselves to the vices of a patron, or become the mouthpiece and echo of a coterie; we shall be in that case slaves of a faction, not servants of the public, nor shall we long have a spark of the old Roman or the old English virtue left. Good-nature, conviviality, hospitality, habits of acquaintance and regard, favours received or conferred, spirit and eloquence to defend a friend when pressed hard upon, courtesy and good-breeding, are one thing—patriotism, firmness of principle, are another. The true patriot knows when to make each of these in turn give way to or control the other, in furtherance of the common good, just as the accomplished courtier makes all other interests, friendships, cabals, resentments, reconciliations, subservient to his attachment to the person of the king. He has the welfare of his country, the cause of mankind at heart, and makes that the scale in which all other motives are weighed as in a balance. With this inward prompter, he knows when to speak and when to hold his tongue, when to temporise, and when to throw away the scabbard, when to make men of service to principles, and when to make principles the sole condition of popularity,—nearly as well as if he had a title or a pension depending in reversion on his success: for it is true that ‘in their generation the children of this world are wiser than the children of light.’ In my opinion, Charles Fox had too much of what we mean by ‘the milk of human kindness’ to be a practical statesman, particularly in critical times, and with a cause of infinite magnitude at stake. He was too easy a friend, and too generous an enemy. He was willing to think better of those with whom he acted, or to whom he was opposed, than they deserved. He was the creature of temperament and sympathy, and suffered his feelings to be played upon, and to get the better of his principles, which were not of the most rigid kind—not ‘stuff o’ the conscience.’ With all the power of the crown, and all the strongholds of prejudice and venality opposed to him, ‘instead of a softness coming over the heart of a man,’ he should (in such a situation) have ‘turned to the stroke his adamantine scales that feared no discipline of human hands,’ and made it a struggle ad internecionem on the one side, as it was on the other. There was no place for moderation, much less for huckstering and trimming. Mr. Burke saw the thing right enough. It was a question about a principle—about the existence or extinction of human rights in the abstract. He was on the side of legitimate slavery; Mr. Fox on that of natural liberty. That was no reason he should be less bold or jealous in her defence, because he had every thing to contend against. But he made too many coalitions, too many compromises with flattery, with friendship, (to say nothing of the baits of power) not to falter and be defeated at last in the noble stand he had made for the principles of freedom.
Another sort are as much too captious and precise, as these are lax and cullible in their notions of political warfare. Their fault is an overweening egotism, as that of the former was too great a facility of temper. They will have every thing their own way to the minutest tittle, or they cannot think of giving it their sanction and support. The cause must come to them, they will not go to the cause. They stand upon their punctilio. They have a character at stake, which is dearer to them than the whole world. They have an idea of perfect truth and beauty in their own minds, the contemplation of which is a never-failing source of delight and consolation to them,
‘Though sun and moon were in the flat sea sunk,’
and which they will not soil by mixing it up with the infirmities of any cause or any party. They will not, ‘to do a great right, do a little wrong.’ They will let the lofty pillar inscribed to human liberty fall to the ground sooner than extend a finger to save it, on account of the dust and cobwebs that cling to it. It is not this great and mighty object they are thinking of all the time, but their own fantastic reputation and puny pretensions. While the world is tumbling about our ears, and the last hold of liberty, the ark containing our birth-right, the only possible barrier against barefaced tyranny, is tottering—instead of setting the engines and the mortal instruments at work to prop it, and fighting in the trenches to the last drop, they are washing their hands of all imaginary imperfections, and looking in the glass of their own vanity, with an air of heightened self-complacency. Alas! they do not foresee the fatal consequences; they have an eye only to themselves. While all the power, the prejudice, and ignorance of mankind are drawn up in deadly array against the advance of truth and justice, they owe it to themselves, forsooth! to state the naked merits of the question (heat and passion apart) and pick out all the faults of which their own party has been guilty, to fling as a make-weight into the adversary’s scale of unmeasured abuse and execration. They will not take their ready stand by the side of him who was ‘the very arm and burgonet of man,’ and like a demi-Atlas, could alone prop a declining world, because for themselves they have some objections to the individual instrument, and they think principles more important than persons. No, they think persons of more consequence than principles, and themselves most of all. They injure the principle, through the person most able to protect it. They betray the cause by not defending it as it is attacked, tooth and nail, might and main, without exception and without remorse. When every thing is at stake, dear and valuable to man, as man; when there is but the one dreadful alternative of entire loss, or final recovery of truth and freedom, it is no time to stand upon trifles and moot-points; that great object is to be secured first, and at all hazards.
‘Entire affection scorneth nicer hands.’
But there is a third thing in their minds, a fanciful something which they prefer to both contending parties. It may be so; but neither they nor we can get it. We must have one of the two things imposed upon us, not by choice but by hard necessity. ‘Our bane and antidote are both before us:’ and if we do anything to neglect the one, we justly incur the heavy, intolerable, unredeemed penalty of the other. If our pride is stung, if we have received a blow or the lie in our own persons, we know well enough what to do: our blood is up, we have an actual feeling and object to satisfy; and we are not to be diverted from our purpose by sophistry or mere words. The quarrel is personal to ourselves; and we feel the whole stress of it, rousing every faculty and straining every nerve. But if the quarrel is general to mankind; if it is one in which the rights, freedom, hopes, and happiness of the whole world are embarked; if we see the dignity of our common nature prostrate, trampled upon and mangled before the brute image of power, this gives us little concern; our reason may disapprove, but our passions, our prejudices, are not touched; and therefore our reason, our humanity, our abstract love of right (not ‘screwed to the sticking place’ by some paltry interest of our own) are easily satisfied with any hollow professions of good-will, or put off with vague excuses, or staggered with open defiance. We are here, where a principle only is in danger, at leisure to calculate consequences, prudently for ourselves, or favourably for others: were it a point of honour (we think the honour of human nature is not our honour, that its disgrace is not our disgrace—we are not the rabble!) we should throw consideration and compassion to the dogs, and cry—‘Away to Heaven respective lenity, and fire-eyed fury be my conduct now!’ But charity is cold. We are the dupes of the flatteries of our opponents, because we are indifferent to our own object: we stand in awe of their threats, because in the absence of passion we are tender of our persons. They beat us in courage and in intellect, because we have nothing but the common good to sharpen our faculties or goad our will; they have no less an alternative in view than to be uncontrolled masters of mankind, or to be hurled from high,—
‘To grinning scorn a sacrifice,
And endless infamy!’
They do not celebrate the triumphs of their enemies as their own: it is with them a more feeling disputation. They never give an inch of ground that they can keep; they keep all that they can get; they make no concessions that can redound to their own discredit; they assume all that makes for them; if they pause, it is to gain time; if they offer terms, it is to break them: they keep no faith with enemies: if you relax in your exertions, they persevere the more: if you make new efforts, they redouble theirs. While they give no quarter, you stand upon more ceremony. While they are cutting your throat, or putting the gag in your mouth, you talk of nothing but liberality, freedom of inquiry, and douce humanité. Their object is to destroy you, your object is to spare them—to treat them according to your own fancied dignity. They have sense and spirit enough to take all advantages that will further their cause: you have pedantry and pusillanimity enough to undertake the defence of yours, in order to defeat it. It is the difference between the efficient and the inefficient; and this again resolves itself into the difference between a speculative proposition and a practical interest.
One thing that makes tyrants bold is, that they have the power to justify their wrong. They lay their hands upon the sword, and ask who will dispute their commands. The friends of humanity and justice have not in general this ark of confidence to recur to, and can only appeal to reason and propriety. They oppose power on the plea of right and conscience; and shall they, in pursuance of their claims, violate in the smallest tittle what is due to truth and justice? So that the one have no law but their wills, and the absolute extent of their authority, in attaining or securing their ends, because they make no pretensions to scrupulous delicacy: the others are cooped and cabined in, by all sorts of nice investigations in philosophy, and misgivings of the moral sense; that is, are deprived or curtailed of the means of succeeding in their ends, because those ends are not barefaced violence and wrong. It might as well be said that a man has a right to knock me on the head on the highway, and that I am only to use mildness and persuasion in return, as best suited to the justice of my cause; as that I am not to retaliate and make reprisals on the common enemies of mankind in their own style and mode of execution. Is not a man to defend his liberty, or the liberties of his fellow-men, as strenuously and remorselessly as he would his life or his purse? Men are Quakers in political principle, Turks and Jews in private conscience.
The whole is an error, arising from confounding the distinction between theory and practice, between the still-life of letters and the tug and onset of contending factions. I might recommend to our political mediators the advice which Henry V. addressed to his soldiers on a critical occasion.
‘In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man
As modest stillness and humility;
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger;
Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood,
Disguise fair nature with hard-favour’d rage;
Then lend the eye a terrible aspect;
Let it pry through the portage of the head,
Like the brass-cannon: let the brow o’erwhelm it
As fearfully as doth a galled rock
O’erhang and jutty his confounded base,
Swill’d with the wild and wasteful ocean:
Now set the teeth, and stretch the nostril wide;
Hold hard the breath, and bend up every spirit
To his full height.’
So, in speculation, refine as much as you please, intellectually and morally speaking, and you may do it with advantage. Reason is then the instrument you use, and you cannot raise the standard of perfection you fix upon and propose to others too high, or proceed with too much candour and moderation in the advancement of truth: but in practice, you have not your choice of ends or means. You have two things to decide between, the extreme, probably, of an evil and a considerable good, and if you will not make your mind up to take the best of the two with all its disadvantages and draw-backs you must be contented to take the worst: for as you cannot alter the state of the conflicting parties who are carrying their point by force, or dictate what is best by a word speaking; so by finding fault with the attainable good, and throwing cold water on it, you add fuel to your enemy’s courage and assist his success. ‘Those who are not for us are against us.’ You create a diversion in his favour, by distracting and enervating men’s minds, as much as by questioning the general’s orders, or drawing off a strong detachment in the heat of a battle. Political, is like military warfare. There are but two sides, and after you have once chosen your party, it will not do to stand in the midway, and say you like neither. There is no other to like, in the eye of common sense, or in the practical and inevitable result of the thing. As active partisans, we must take up with the best we can get in the circumstances, and defend it with all our might against a worse cause (which will prevail, if this does not) instead of ‘letting our frail thoughts dally with faint surmise;’—or, while dreaming of an ideal perfection, we shall find ourselves surprised into the train, and gracing the triumph, of the common enemy. It is sufficient if our objects and principles are sound and disinterested. If we were engaged in a friendly contest, where integrity and fair dealing were the order of the day, our means might be as unimpeachable as our ends; but in a struggle with the passions, interests, and prejudices of men, right reason, pure intention, are hardly competent to carry us through: we want another stimulus. The vices may be opposed to each other sometimes with advantage and propriety. A little of the alloy of human frailty may be allowed to lend its aid to the service of humanity; and if we have only so much obstinacy or insensibility as enables us to persevere in the path of public duty with more determination and effect, both our motives and conduct will be above the ordinary standard of political morality. To suppose that we can do much more than this, or that we can set up our individual opinion of what is best in itself, or of the best means of attaining it, and be listened to by the world at large, is egregiously to overrate their docility or our own powers of persuasion.
It is the same want of a centripetal force, of a ruling passion, of a moral instinct of union and co-operation for a general purpose, that makes men fly off into knots and factions, and each set up for the leader of a party himself. Where there is a strong feeling of interest at work, it reconciles and combines the most discordant materials, and fits them to their place in the social machine. But in the conduct and support of the public good, we see ‘nothing but vanity, chaotic vanity.’ There is no forbearance, no self-denial, no magnanimity of proceeding. Every one is seeking his own aggrandisement, or to supplant his neighbour, instead of advancing the popular cause. It is because they have no real regard for it but as it serves as a stalking-horse to their ambition, restless inquietude, or love of cabal. They abuse and vilify their own party, just as they do the Ministers.
‘Each lolls his tongue out at the other,
And shakes his empty noddle at his brother.’
John Bull does not aim so maliciously, or hit so hard at Whigs and Reformers, as Cobbett. The reason is, that a very large proportion of these Marplots and regenerators of the world are actuated by no love of their species or zeal for a general question, but by envy, malice, and all uncharitableness. They are discontented with themselves and with every thing about them. They object to, they dissent from every measure. Nothing pleases their fastidious tastes. For want of something to exercise their ill-humour and troublesome officiousness upon, they abuse the Government:—when they are baulked or tired of this they fall foul of one another. The slightest slip or difference of opinion is never forgiven, but gives birth to a deadly feud. Touch but their petty self-importance, and out comes a flaming denunciation of their own cabal, and all they know about the individuals composing it. This is not patriotism, but spleen—a want of something to do and to talk about—of sense, honesty, and feeling. To wreak their spite on an individual, they will ruin the cause, and serve up the friend and idol of the people sliced and carbonadoed, a delicious morsel to the other side. There is a strange want of keeping in this. They are true neither to themselves nor to their principles. The Reformers are in general, it must be confessed, an ill-conditioned set; and they should be told of this infirmity that most easily besets them. When they find their gall and bitterness overflowing on the very persons who take the lead, and deservedly take the lead, in their affairs, for some slight flaw or misunderstanding, they should be taught to hold their tongues, or be drummed out of the regiment as spies and informers.
Trimming, and want of spirit to declare the honest truth, arise in part from the same source. When a man is not thoroughly convinced of an opinion, or where he does not feel a deep interest in it, he does not like to make himself obnoxious by avowing it; is willing to make all the allowance he can for difference of sentiment, and consults his own safety by retiring from a sinking cause. This is the very time when the genuine partisan, who has a rooted attachment to a principle, and feels it as a part of himself, finds himself most called upon to come forward in its support. His anxiety for truth and justice leaves him in no fear for himself, and the sincerity of his motives makes him regardless of censure or obloquy. His profession of hearty devotion to freedom was not an ebullition called forth by the sunshine of prosperity, a lure for popularity and public favour; and when these desert it, he still maintains his post with his integrity. There is a natural timidity of mind, also, which can never go the whole length of any opinion, but is always interlarding its qualified assent with unmeaning buts and ifs; as there is a levity and discursiveness of imagination which cannot settle finally in any belief, and requires a succession of glancing views, topics, and opposite conclusions, to satisfy its appetite for intellectual variety. I have known persons leave the cause of independence and freedom, not because they found it unprofitable, but because they found it flat and stale for want of novelty. At the same time, interest is a great stimulator; and perhaps the success of their early principles might have reconciled them to their embarrassing monotony. Few persons have strength and simplicity of mind (without some additional inducement) to be always harping on the same string, or to put up with the legitimate variety to be found in an abstract principle, applicable to all emergencies. They like changeable silks better than lasting homespun. A sensible man once mentioned to me his having called on —— that morning, who entertained him with a tirade against the Bourbons for two hours; but he said he did not at all feel convinced that he might not have been writing Ultra-royalist paragraphs for the ——, just before he came, in their favour, and only shifted his side of the argument, as a man who is tired of lying too long on one side of his body is glad to turn to the other. There was much shrewdness, and equal probability in this conjecture.
I think the spirit of partisanship is of use in a point of view that has not been distinctly adverted to. It serves as a conductor to carry off our antipathies and ill-blood in a quarter and a manner that is least hurtful to the general weal. A thorough partisan is a good hater; but he hates only one side of a question, and that the outside. His bigotry throws human nature into strong light and shade; he has his sympathies as well as his antipathies; it is not all black or a dull drab-colour. He does not generalise in his contempt or disgust, or proceed from individuals to universals. He lays the faults and vices of mankind to the account of sects and parties, creeds and classes. Man in himself is a good sort of animal. It is the being a Tory or a Whig (as it may happen) that makes a man a knave or fool; but then we hardly look upon him as of the same species with ourselves. Kings are not arbitrary, nor priests hypocritical, because they are men, but because they are kings and priests. We form certain nominal abstractions of these classes, which the more we dislike them, the less natural do they seem, and leave the general character of the species untouched, or act as a foil to it. There is nothing that is a greater damper to party spirit than to suggest that the errors and enormities of both sides arise from certain inherent dispositions, common to the species. It shocks the liberal and enlightened among us, to suppose that under any circumstances they could become bigots, tools, persecutors. They wipe their hands clean of all such aspersions. There is a great gulph of prejudice and passion placed between us and our opponents; and this is interpreted into a natural barrier and separation of sentiment and feeling. ‘Our withers are unwrung.’ Burke represented modern revolutionists to himself, under the equivocal similitude of ‘green-eyed, spring-nailed, velvet-pawed philosophers, whether going on two legs or on four;’ and thus removed to a distance from his own person all the ill attributes with which he had complimented the thorough-bred metaphysician. By comparing the plausible qualities of a Minister of state to the sleekness of the panther, I myself seem to have no more affinity with that whole genus, than with the whiskers and claws of that formidable and spirited animal. Bishop Taylor used to reprimand his rising pride by saying, at the sight of a reprobate, ‘There goes my wicked self:’ we do not apply the same method politically, and say, ‘There goes my Tory or my Jacobin self.’ We suppose the two things incompatible. The Calvinist damns the Arminian, the Protestant the Papist, &c. but it is not for a difference of nature, but an opposition of opinion. The spirit of partizanship is not a spirit of our misanthropy. But for the vices and errors of example and institution, mankind are (on this principle) only a little lower than the angels: it is false doctrine and absurd prejudices that make demons of them. The only original sin is differing in opinion with us: of that they are curable like any occasional disorder, and the man comes out, from beneath the husk of his party and prejudices, pure and immaculate. Make proselytes of them, let them come over to our way of thinking, and they are a different race of beings quite. This is to be effected by the force of argument and the progress of knowledge. It is well, it is perfectly well. We cast the slough of our vices with the shibboleth of our party; a Reform in Parliament would banish all knavery and folly from the land. It is not the same wretched little mischievous animal, man, that is alike under all denominations and all systems, and in whom different situations and notions only bring out different inherent, incorrigible vices and propensities; but the professions and the theory being changed for the one, which we think the only true and infallible one, the whole world, by the mere removal of our arbitrary prejudices and modes of thinking, would become as sincere, as benevolent, as independent, and as worthy people as we are! To hate and proscribe half the species under various pretexts and nicknames, seems, therefore, the only way to entertain a good opinion of ourselves and mankind in general.