Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle

by Henry Noel Brailsford

CHAPTER II

THOMAS PAINE

"Where Liberty is, there is my country." The sentiment has a Latin ring; one can imagine an early Stoic as its author. It was spoken by Benjamin Franklin, and no saying better expresses the spirit of eighteenth century humanity. "Where is not Liberty, there is mine." The answer is Thomas Paine's. It is the watchword of the knight errant, the marching music that sent Lafayette to America, and Byron to Greece, the motto of every man who prizes striving above enjoyment, honours comradeship above patriotism, and follows an idea that no frontier can arrest. Paine was indeed of no century, and no formula of classification can confine him. His writing is of the age of enlightenment; his actions belong to romance. His clear, manly style, his sturdy commonsense, the rapier play of his epigrams, the formal, logical architecture of his thoughts, his complacent limitations, his horror of mystery and Gothic half-lights, his harsh contempt for all the sacred muddle of priestly traditions and aristocratic politics, his assurance, his intellectual courage, his humanity—all that, in its best and its worst, belongs to the century of Voltaire and the Revolution. In his spirit of adventure, in his passion for movement and combat, there Paine is romantic. Paine thought in prose and acted epics. He drew horizons on paper and pursued the infinite in deeds.

Tom Paine was born, the son of a Quaker stay-maker, in 1737, at Thetford, in the county of Norfolk. His parents were poor, but he owed much, he tells us, to a good moral education and picked up "a tolerable stock of useful learning," though he knew no language but his own. A "Friend" he was to the end in his independence, his rationalism, and his humanity, though he laughed when he thought of what a sad-coloured world the Quakers would have made of the creation, if they had been consulted. The boy craved adventure, and was prevented at seventeen from enlisting in the crew of the privateer Terrible, Captain Death, only to sail somewhat later in the King of Prussia, Captain Mendez. One cruise under a licensed pirate was enough for him, and he soon settled in London, making stays for a living and spending his leisure in the study of astronomy. He qualified as an exciseman, acquiring in this employment a grasp of finance and an interest in budgets of which he afterwards made good use in his writings. Cashiered for negligence, he turned schoolmaster, and even aspired to ordination in the Church of England. Reinstated as a "gauger," he was eventually dismissed for writing a pamphlet in defence of the excisemen's agitation for higher wages. He was twice married, but his first wife died within a year of marriage, and the second, with whom he had started a "tobacco-mill," agreed on its failure, apparently for no definite fault on either side, to a mutual separation. At thirty-seven, penniless, lonely, and stamped with failure, yet conscious of powers which had found no scope in the Old World, he emigrated in 1774 to America with a letter from Benjamin Franklin as his passport to fortune.

Opportunity came promptly, and Paine was presently settled in Philadelphia as the editor of the Pennsylvania Magazine. From the pages of this periodical, his admirable biographer, Mr. Moncure D. Conway, has unearthed a series of articles which show that Paine had somehow brought with him from England a mental equipment which ranked him already among the moral pioneers of his generation. He advocates international arbitration; he attacks duelling; he suggests more rational ideas of marriage and divorce; he pleads for mercy to animals; he demands justice for women. Above all, he assails negro slavery, and with such mastery and fervour, that five weeks after the appearance of his article, the first American Anti-Slavery Society was founded at Philadelphia. The abolition of slavery was a cause for which he never ceased to struggle, and when in later life he became the target of religious persecutors, it was in their dual capacity of Christians and slave-owners that men stoned him. The American colonies were now at the parting of the ways in the struggle with the Mother Country. The revolt had begun with a limited object, and few if any of its leaders realised whither they were tending. Paine it was, who after the slaughter at Lexington, abandoned all thoughts of reconciliation and was the first to preach independence and republicanism.

His pamphlet, Common-Sense (1776), achieved a circulation which was an event in the history of printing, and fixed in men's minds as firm resolves what were, before he wrote, no more than fluid ideas. It spoke to rebels and made a nation. Poor though Paine was, he poured the whole of the immense profits which he received from the sale of his little book into the colonial war-chest, shouldered a musket, joined Washington's army as a private, and was soon promoted to be aide-de-camp to General Greene. Paine's most valuable weapon, however, was still his pen. Writing at night, after endless marches, by the light of camp fires at a moment of general depression, when even Washington thought that the game was "pretty well up," Paine began to write the series of pamphlets afterwards collected under the title of The American Crisis. They did for the American volunteers what Rouget de Lisle's immortal song did for the French levies in the revolutionary wars, what Körner's martial ballads did for the German patriots in the Napoleonic wars. These superb pages of exhortation were read in every camp to the disheartened men; their courage commanded victory. Burke himself wrote nothing finer than the opening sentences of the first "crisis," a trumpet call indeed, but phrased by an artist who knew the science of compelling music from brass:—

"These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands it now, deserves the thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like Hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap we esteem too lightly; it is dearness only that gives everything its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as freedom should not be highly rated."

"Common-sense" Paine was now the chief of the moral forces behind the fighting Republic, and his power of thinking boldly and stating clearly drove it forward to its destiny under the leadership of men whom Nature had gifted with less trenchant minds. He was in succession Foreign Secretary to Congress and clerk to the Pennsylvania Assembly, and we find him converting despair into triumph by the magic of self-sacrifice. He it was who in 1780 saved the finances of the war in a moment of despair, by starting the patriotic subscription with the gift of his own salary, and in 1781 proved his diplomatic gift in a journey to Paris by obtaining money-aid from the French Court.

Paine might have settled down to enjoy his fame, after the war, on the little property which the State of New York gave him. He loathed inaction and escaped middle age. In 1787 he returned to England, partly to carry his pen where the work of liberation called for it, partly to forward his mechanical inventions. Paine, self-educated though he was, was a capable mathematician, and he followed the progress of the applied sciences with passion. His inventions include a long list of things partly useful, partly whimsical, a planing machine, a crane, a smokeless candle and a gunpowder motor. But his fame as an inventor rests on his construction of the first iron bridge, made after his models and plans at Wearmouth. He was received as a leader and teacher in the ardent circle of reformers grouped round the Revolution Society and the Corresponding Society. Others were the dreamers and theorists of liberty. He had been at the making of a Republic, and his American experience gave the stimulus to English Radicalism which events in France were presently to repeat. His fame was already European, and at the fall of the Bastille, it was to Paine that Lafayette confided its key, when a free France sent that symbol of defeated despotism as a present to a free America. He seemed the natural link between three revolutions, the one which had succeeded in the New World, the other which was transforming France, and the third which was yet to come in England.

Burke's Reflections rang in his ears like a challenge, and he sat promptly down in his inn to write his reply. The Rights of Man is an answer to Burke, but it is much more. The vivid pages of history in which he explains and defends the French Revolution which Burke had attacked and misunderstood, are only an illustration to his main argument. He expounds the right of revolution, and blows away the cobweb argument of legality by which his antagonist had sought to confine posterity within the settlement of 1688. Every age and generation must be free to act for itself. Man has no property in man, and the claim of one generation to govern beyond the grave is of all tyrannies the most insolent. Burke had contended for the right of the dead to govern the living, but that which a whole nation chooses to do, it has a right to do. The men of 1688, who surrendered their own rights and bound themselves to obey King William and his heirs, might indeed choose to be slaves; but that could not lessen the right of their children to be free. Wrongs cannot have a legal descent. Here was a bold and triumphant answer to a sophistical argument; but it served Paine only as a preface to his exposition of the American constitution, which was "to Liberty what a grammar is to language," and to his plea for the adoption in England of the French charter of the Rights of Man.