S. And to their articles on Scott’s Novels, on Hospitals, on National Distress, on Moore’s Life of Sheridan, and on every subject of taste, feeling, or common humanity. Sheridan, in particular, is termed ‘an unsuccessful adventurer.’ How gently this Jacobin jargon will fall on ears polite! This is what they call attacking principles and sparing persons: they spare the persons indeed of men in power (who have places to give away), and attack the characters of the dead or the unsuccessful with impunity! Sheridan’s brilliant talents, his genius, his wit, his political firmness (which all but they admire) draw forth no passing tribute of admiration; his errors, his misfortunes, and his death (which all but they deplore) claim no pity. This indeed would be to understand the doctrine of Utility to very little purpose, if it did not at the first touch weed from the breast every amiable weakness and imperfect virtue which had—never taken root there. But they make up for their utter want of sympathy with the excellences or failings of others by a proportionable self-sufficiency. Sheridan, Fox, and Burke were mere tyros and school-boys in politics compared to them, who are the ‘mighty land-marks of these latter times’—ignorant of those principles of ‘the greatest happiness to the greatest numbers,’ which a few and recent writers have promulgated. It is one way of raising a pure and lofty enthusiasm, as to the capacities of the human mind, to scorn all that has gone before us. Rather say, this dwelling with overacted disgust on common frailties, and turning away with impatience from the brightest points of character, is ‘a discipline of humanity,’ which should be confined as much as possible to the Westminster School. Believe me, their theories and their mode of enforcing them stand in the way of reform: their philosophy is as little addressed to the head as to the heart—it is fit neither for man nor beast. It is not founded on any sympathy with the secret yearnings or higher tendencies of man’s nature, but on a rankling antipathy to whatever is already best. Its object is to offend—its glory to find out and wound the tenderest part. What is not malice, is cowardice, and not candour. They attack the weak and spare the strong, to indulge their officiousness and add to their self-importance. Nothing is said in the Westminster Review of the treatment of Mr. Buckingham by the East India Company: it might lessen the writer’s sphere of utility, as Mr. Hall goes from Leicester to Bristol to save more souls! They do not grapple with the rich to wrest his superfluities from him (in this they might be foiled) but trample on the poor (a safe and pick-thank office) and wrench his pittance from him with their logical instruments and lying arguments. Let their system succeed, as they pretend it would, and diffuse comfort and happiness around; and they would immediately turn against it as effeminate, insipid, and sickly; for their tastes and understandings are too strongly braced to endure any but the most unpalatable truths and the bitterest ingredients. Their benefits are extracted by the Cæsarean operation. Their happiness, in short, is that—which will never be; just as their receipt for a popular article in a newspaper or review, is one that will never be read. Their articles are never read, and if they are not popular, no others ought to be so. The more any flimsy stuff is read and admired, and the more service it does to the sale of a journal, so much the more does it debauch the public taste, and render it averse to their dry and solid lucubrations. This is why they complain of the patronage of my Sentimentalities as one of the sins of the Edinburgh Review; and why they themselves are determined to drench the town with the most unsavoury truths, without one drop of honey to sweeten the gall. Had they felt the least regard to the ultimate success of their principles—of ‘the greatest happiness to the greatest numbers,’ though giving pain might be one paramount and primary motive, they would have combined this object with something like the comfort and accommodation of their unenlightened readers.
R. I see no ground for this philippic, except in your own imagination.
S. Tell me, do they not abuse poetry, painting, music? Is it, think you, for the pain or the pleasure these things give? Or because they are without eyes, ears, imaginations? Is that an excellence in them, or the fault of these arts? Why do they treat Shakespear so cavalierly? Is there any one they would set up against him—any Sir Richard Blackmore they patronise; or do they prefer Racine, as Adam Smith did before them? Or what are we to understand?
R. I can answer for it, they do not wish to pull down Shakespear in order to set up Racine on the ruins of his reputation. They think little indeed of Racine.
S. Or of Moliere either, I suppose?
R. Not much.
S. And yet these two contributed something to ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest numbers;’ that is, to the amusement and delight of a whole nation for the last century and a half. But that goes for nothing in the system of Utility, which is satisfied with nothing short of the good of the whole. Such benefactors of the species, as Shakespear, Racine, and Moliere, who sympathised with human character and feeling in their finest and liveliest moods, can expect little favour from ‘those few and recent writers,’ who scorn the Muse, and whose philosophy is a dull antithesis to human nature. Unhappy they who lived before their time! Oh! age of Louis XIV. and of Charles II., ignorant of the Je ne sçais quoi and of the sçavoir vivre! Oh! Paris built (till now) of mud! Athens, Rome, Susa, Babylon, Palmyra—barbarous structures of a barbarous period—hide your diminished heads! Ye fens and dykes of Holland, ye mines of Mexico, what are ye worth! Oh! bridges raised, palaces adorned, cities built, fields cultivated without skill or science, how came ye to exist till now! Oh! pictures, statues, temples, altars, hearths, the poet’s verse, and solemn-breathing airs, are ye not an insult on the great principles of ‘a few and recent writers’? How came ye to exist without their leave? Oh! Arkwright, unacquainted with spinning-jennies! Oh, Sir Robert Peel, unversed in calico-printing! Oh! generation of upstarts, what good could have happened before your time? What ill can happen after it?
R. But at least you must allow the importance of first principles?
S. Much as I respect a dealer in marine stores, in old rags and iron: both the goods and the principles are generally stolen. I see advertised in the papers—‘Elements of Political Economy, by James Mill,’ and ‘Principles of Political Economy, by John Macculloch.’ Will you tell me in this case, whose are the First Principles? which is the true Simon Pure?
‘Strange! that such difference there should be