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.—