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]]