And to be lord of all the works of nature?
To reign in the air from earth to highest sky,
To feed on flowers and weeds of glorious feature,
To taste whatever thing doth please the eye?
Who rests not pleased with such happiness,
Well worthy he to taste of wretchedness!’
Without air or light, they grope their way under-ground, till they are made ‘fierce with dark keeping:’[[27]] their attention, confined to the same dry, hard, mechanical subjects, which they have not the power nor the will to exchange for others, frets and corrodes; and soured and disappointed, they wreak their spite and mortification on all around them.
R. I cannot but think your imagination runs away with your candour. Surely the writers you are so ready to inveigh against labour hard to correct errors and reform grievances.
S. Yes; because the one affords exercise for their vanity, and the other for their spleen. They are attracted by the odour of abuses, and regale on fancied imperfections. But do you suppose they like any thing else better than they do the Government? Are they on any better terms with their own families or friends? Do they not make the lives of every one they come near a torment to them, with their pedantic notions and captious egotism? Do they not quarrel with their neighbours, placard their opponents, supplant those on their own side of the question? Are they not equally at war with the rich and the poor? And having failed (for the present) in their project of cashiering kings, do they not give scope to their troublesome, overbearing humour, by taking upon them to snub and lecture the poor gratis? Do they not wish to extend ‘the greatest happiness to the greatest numbers,’ by putting a stop to population—to relieve distress by withholding charity, to remedy disease by shutting up hospitals? Is it not a part of their favourite scheme, their nostrum, their panacea, to prevent the miseries and casualties of human life by extinguishing it in the birth? Do they not exult in the thought (and revile others who do not agree to it) of plucking the crutch from the cripple, and tearing off the bandages from the agonized limb? Is it thus they would gain converts, or make an effectual stand against acknowledged abuses, by holding up a picture of the opposite side, the most sordid, squalid, harsh, and repulsive, that narrow reasoning, a want of imagination, and a profusion of bile can make it? There is not enough of evil already in the world, but we must harden our feelings against the miseries that daily, hourly, present themselves to our notice, and set our faces against every thing that promises to afford any one the least gratification or pleasure. This is their idea of a perfect commonwealth: where each member performs his part in the machine, taking care of himself, and no more concerned about his neighbours, than the iron and wood-work, the pegs and nails in a spinning-jenny. Good screw! good wedge! good ten-penny nail! Are they really in earnest, or are they bribed, partly by their interests, partly by the unfortunate bias of their minds, to play the game into the adversary’s hands? It looks like it; and the Government give them ‘good œillades’—Mr. Blackwood pats them on the back—Mr. Canning grants an interview and plays the amiable—Mr. Hobhouse keeps the peace. One of them has a place at the India-House: but then nothing is said against the India-House, though the poor and pious Old Lady sweats and almost swoons at the conversations which her walls are doomed to hear, but of which she is ashamed to complain. One triumph of the School is to throw Old Ladies into hysterics![[28]] The obvious (I should still hope not the intentional) effect of the Westminster tactics is to put every volunteer on the same side hors de combat, who is not a zealot of the strictest sect of those they call Political Economists; to come behind you with dastard, cold-blooded malice, and trip up the heels of those stragglers whom their friends and patrons in the Quarterly have left still standing; to strip the cause of Reform (out of seeming affection to it) of every thing like a misalliance with elegance, taste, decency, common sense, or polite literature, (as their fellow labourers in the same vineyard had previously endeavoured to do out of acknowledged hatred)—to disgust the friends of humanity, to cheer its enemies; and for the sake of indulging their unbridled dogmatism, envy and uncharitableness, to leave nothing intermediate between the Ultra-Toryism of the courtly scribes and their own Ultra-Radicalism—between the extremes of practical wrong and impracticable right. Their, our antagonists will be very well satisfied with this division of the spoil:—give them the earth, and any one who chooses may take possession of the moon for them!
R. You allude to their attacks on the Edinburgh Review?