THE PRESS—COLERIDGE, SOUTHEY, WORDSWORTH, AND BENTHAM
| The Yellow Dwarf.] | [January 3, 1818. |
A debate has been lately going on, in the French House of Commons, respecting the Liberty of the Press. M. Jollivet said, ‘the Liberty of the Press is less necessary in a Representative Government than in any other.’ ‘The press’ he added, ‘is represented as the only instrument by which truth can be made known; but the passions of men are too impetuous, to permit the Press that liberty which some demand. The real national representation is in the King;[[44]]—the legitimate inheritance of his Crown, from whence all powers and honours are derived, fixes there, with the destinies of the people. This is the primitive representation, from which all others emanate. There is the sacred depot of sovereignty. The powers established by the Charter are only the means of that sovereignty, for the dispensation of order and justice. We must then leave out of the question this pretended influence of the Liberty of the Press upon our representative Government, in favour of the branch called the Democratic. We must reject principles which can never return in France. By this course we may perhaps lose some commentaries upon the rights of man, but all classes of society will find their repose in it.’
So says M. Jollivet; and so sings a modern bard:—
‘Kiuprili—Had’st thou believ’d thine own tale, had’st thou fancied
Thyself the rightful successor of Andreas,
Would’st thou have pilfer’d from our school-boys’ themes
These shallow sophisms of a popular choice?
What people? How convened? or, if convened,
Must not the magic power that charms together
Millions of men in council, needs have power
To win or wield them? Better, O far better
Shout forth thy titles to yon circling mountains
And with a thousand-fold reverberation
Make the rocks flatter thee, and the volleying air,
Unbribed, shout back to thee, King Emerick!
By wholesome laws t’imbank the sov’reign power,
To deepen by restraint, and by prevention
Of lawless will t’amass and guide the flood,
In its majestic channel, is man’s task
And the true patriot’s glory! In all else
Men safelier trust to Heaven, than to themselves
When least themselves in the mad whirl of crowds
Where folly is contagious, and too oft
Even wise men leave their better sense at home
To chide and wonder at them when return’d.’
Coleridge’s Zapolya.
Whether M. Jollivet, the French speaker, was one of the Orators of the Human Race in the time of Robespierre, we do not know; but this we know, that Mr. Coleridge was at that time delivering Conciones ad populum in a tone of mob-sycophancy, the height and heat of which could, it seems, only be qualified by the doctrines of Divine Right and Passive Obedience. The above exquisite morceau of political logic, and dramatic recantation of the author’s popular harangues, was intended for representation at Drury-Lane Theatre, and was one of the passages pointed out, if we are to believe Mr. Coleridge, as a reason for the rejection of this spurious offspring of his loyal Muse.
Mr. Southey has not yet given us a poetical version of the true Jus Divinum. We should like to know what he says to this speech of M. Jollivet—Content or Not Content—and whether this was the result he anticipated when he so sweetly and loudly, about three years ago, invited France ‘restored and shaking off her chain’ to join in his (Mr. Southey’s) triumphal song,—
‘Glory to God on high, Deliverance to Mankind.’
Can that laurel wreathe which adorns his brows (if it still adorns them) any longer hide or prevent those blushes, deep and lasting, which should suffuse his once well-meaning face for having been the shameful dupe of a cozenage so shameful?
As to Mr. Wordsworth, another of these heroic deliverers, he is ‘a full solemne man,’ and you cannot get much out of him. But we should like to hear his opinion—Aye or No—of M. Jollivet’s allied notions of liberty and the rights of man. Is this sort of legitimate clapping down under the hatches the deliverance for which he mouthed out deep-toned Odes and Sonnets? Is this repose, the repose of lasting slavery and avowed, barefaced annihilation of the rights of human nature, the consummation devoutly to be wished, which kindled in him so much disinterested zeal against all his old friends and feelings? If he were to say so, the very echoes of his favourite mountains, ‘with thousand-fold reverberation,’ would contradict him. But he says nothing. He is profoundly silent. He will not answer Mum to our Budget. From the elevation of his former well-timed enthusiasm against tyrants and conquerors, he slid into a place: and he will never rise out of it by any ill-timed intemperance. Snug’s the word. St. Peter is well at Rome; and Mr. Wordsworth is attached to the Excise. What is it to him, seated on Rydal Mount, what M. Jollivet, a prating Frenchman, says to that poor creature, Louis XVIII? It is enough for Mr. Wordsworth that he signs his stamped receipts and distributes them:—he is not bound, by his office, to subscribe to M. Jollivet’s doctrines, or to circulate them in this country. He is a customhouse officer, and no longer a citizen of the world. He keeps himself quiet, like the philosopher of old, lest the higher powers should hear him. If he were to mutter a syllable against any one act of legitimate despotism, he knows (in his sleeve) that not all his odes on Hoffer and Schill, and the Cortes, or even to the King, would save him one hour. He is wise. After having endorsed the accommodation bills of the Allied Sovereigns on liberty and independence, with a pen which ought to have been sacred to humanity, he now leaves it to the people of France, Spain, Italy, to us, to the world, to take up these dishonoured forgeries, and will not utter a word of resentment or indignation, or contempt, against those who have made him a poor accomplice in a fraud upon mankind!
This sort of shuffling on the side of principle, and tenaciousness on the side of power, seems to be the peculiar privilege of the race of modern poets. The philosophers, if not much wiser, appear to be honester. Some of these had been taken in, but they want to be let out. They declare off in time to save at least their own characters, and will not sign and seal ‘a dateless bargain to all-engrossing despotism,’ when she unfolds the long dark scroll of her rotten parchment bonds to them, and they see it ‘stretching out even to the crack of doom.’ They had got into a bad house, it is true, thinking, though the owners were the same, they had changed their calling, in company with an old bawd masked, who pretended to have just escaped being robbed and ravished, if not murdered. They were proud of such an opportunity of shewing their gallantry. But as soon as the old lady pulled off her mask of Legitimacy, and shewed herself ‘the same, that is, that was, and is to be,’ our philosophers went to the window, threw up the sash, and alarmed the neighbourhood; while the poets, either charmed, with the paint and patches of the hag, or with her gold and trinkets, put a grave face upon the matter, make it a point of conscience, a match for life—for better or worse, stick to their filthy bargain, go to bed, and by lying quiet and keeping close, would fain persuade the people out of doors that all is well, while they are fumbling at the regeneration of mankind out of an old rotten carcase, and threatening us, as the legitimate consequence of their impotent and obscene attempts, with the spawn of Bible and Missionary Societies, Schools for All, and a little aiery of children, with a whole brood of hornbooks and catechisms,—a superfetation more preposterous than that of Mrs. Tofts, the rabbit-breeding lady in Hogarth.—Mr. Bentham was one of the philosophers who were so taken in by the projects of the Holy Alliance, but who did not chuse to continue so with his eyes open. He had lent an ear to the promises of kings. He thought tyrants had taken a sudden fancy to the abstract principles of sound legislation. With a little exuberance of philosophical vanity, and a little want of philosophical penetration, he thought he could ‘charm these deaf adders wisely.’ He thought absolute sovereigns, having suffered persecution, had learnt mercy: that they were convinced, by their own experience, of the value of justice, truth, and liberty. He did not suspect their appeal to humanity was the cry of the crocodile to allure and destroy: he, like many more, thought their tears were ‘drops which sacred pity had engendered.’ Not so. He soon found his mistake; and no sooner found, than he hastes to amend it. He does not try (half fool, half knave) to hush up the affair, to screen their villainy, or salve his own idle vanity. Out the whole story comes, in a book which he has just published,[[45]] containing an account of the papers, and correspondence which passed between himself and the Emperor Alexander. Mr. Bentham sent the autocrat a plan of legislation, and the sovereign sent him a snuff-box in return. The Emperor however took no other notice of the plan, and the legislator returned the snuff-box. This was as it should be. It is of course the favourite object of Alexander to be lord over millions of slaves: it must be Mr. Bentham’s greatest ambition to be a wise and honest man. He had committed his character for wisdom sufficiently in supposing that the lord of millions of slaves would, in the pure coxcombry of his heart, and in the giddy round of gold snuff-boxes, and in his delight in the infinite multiplication of his own pictures set in brilliants, set millions of slaves free! The Emperor would as soon let Mr. Bentham cuckold him as resign his people to the Platonic embraces of Mr. Bentham’s legislative genius. But having gone thus far on a wrong calculation of the characters of rulers, Mr. Bentham was too honest a man to try to repeat the imposition upon others of which he had been made the momentary dupe himself. He was not ambitious any longer to remain that tool
‘Which knaves do work with, called a fool.’
He would not be made a mild decoy of humanity, and go a dottrel-catching with the Emperor Alexander in Finland, in Poland, or in South America. He would not be made an amiable stalking-horse of liberty and equality for royal sportsmen to catch their silly prey, the human race, and then to be turned loose, stripped of his netting and his ribbons, to graze where he could. He had a spirit above it. He could not brook this league with detected hypocrisy and barefaced power. He had not the stomach to swallow a lie for truth. He could not bring himself to say, or by any tampering with his own mind to believe that a thing was what he knew it was not. He was by habit a logician—by nature, a plain, literal man. ‘The Gods had not made him poetical.’ That is, Mr. Bentham had not, like Messrs. Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Southey, been playing at fast and loose with fiction, till he could like them believe whatever he pleased of matter of fact, and stand to it stoutly too with ‘a mingled air of cunning and of impudence,’—to the equal satisfaction of his understanding and his conscience!