Stands ready to smite once and smite no more.’
Give a dog an ill name, and hang him—so says the proverb. The courtiers say, ‘Give a patriot an ill name, and ruin him’ alike with Whig and Tory—with the last, because he hates you as a friend to freedom; with the first, because he is afraid of being implicated in the same obloquy with you. This is the reason why the Magdalen Muse of Mr. Thomas Moore finds a taint in the Liberal; why Mr. Hobhouse visits Pisa, to dissuade Lord Byron from connecting himself with any but gentlemen-born, for the credit of the popular cause. Set about a false report or insinuation, and the effect is instantaneous and universally felt—prove that there is nothing in it, and you are just where you were. Something wrong somewhere, in reality or imagination, in public or in private, is necessary to the minds of the English people: bring a charge against any one, and they hug you to their breasts: attempt to take it from them, and they resist it as they would an attack upon their persons or property: a nickname is to their moody, splenetic humour a freehold estate, from which they will not be ejected by fair means or foul: they conceive they have a vested right in calumny. No matter how base the lie, how senseless the jest, it tells—because the public appetite greedily swallows whatever is nauseous and disgusting, and refuses, through weakness or obstinacy, to disgorge it again. Therefore Mr. Croker plies his dirty task—and is a Privy-councillor; Mr. Theodore Hook calls Mr. Waithman ‘Lord Waithman’ once a week, and passes for a wit!
I had the good fortune to meet the other day at Paris with my old fellow-student Dr. E——, after a lapse of thirty years; he is older than I by a year or two, and makes it five-and-twenty. He had not been idle since we parted. He sometimes looked in, after having paid La Place a visit; and I told him it was almost as if he had called on a star in his way. It is wonderful how friendship, that has long lain unused, accumulates like money at compound interest. We had to settle a long account, and to compare old times and new. He was naturally anxious to learn the state of our politics and literature, and was not a little mortified to hear that England, ‘whose boast it was to give out reformation to the world,’ had changed her motto, and was now bent on propping up the continental despotisms, and on lashing herself to them. He was particularly mortified at the degraded state of our public press—at the systematic organization of a corps of government-critics to decry every liberal sentiment, and proscribe every liberal writer as an enemy to the person of the reigning sovereign, only because he did not avow the principles of the Stuarts. I had some difficulty in making him understand the full lengths of the malice, the lying, the hypocrisy, the sleek adulation, the meanness, equivocation, and skulking concealment, of a Quarterly Reviewer,[[45]]
the reckless blackguardism of Mr. Blackwood, and the obtuse drivelling profligacy of the John Bull. He said, ‘It is worse with you than with us: here an author is obliged to sacrifice twenty mornings and twenty pair of black silk-stockings, in paying his court to the Editors of different journals, to ensure a hearing from the public; but with you, it seems, he must give up his understanding and his character, to establish a claim to taste or learning.’ He asked if the scandal could not be disproved, and retorted on the heads of the aggressors: but I said that these were persons of no character, or studiously screened by their employers; and besides, the English imagination was a bird of heavy wing, that, if once dragged through the kennel of Billingsgate abuse, could not well raise itself out of it again. He could hardly believe that under the Hanover dynasty (a dynasty founded to secure us against tyranny) a theatrical licenser had struck the word ‘tyrant’ out of Mr. Shee’s tragedy, as offensive to ears polite, or as if from this time forward there could be supposed to be no such thing in rerum naturâ; and that the common ejaculation, ‘Good God!’ was erased from the same piece, as in a strain of too great levity in this age of cant. I told him that public opinion in England was at present governed by half a dozen miscreants, who undertook to bait, hoot, and worry every man out of his country, or into an obscure grave, with lies and nicknames, who was not prepared to take the political sacrament of the day, and use his best endeavours (he and his friends) to banish the last traces of freedom, truth, and honesty from the land. ‘To be direct and honest is not safe.’ To be a Reformer, the friend of a Reformer, or the friend’s friend of a Reformer, is as much as a man’s peace, reputation, or even life is worth. Answer, if it is not so, pale shade of Keats, or living mummy of William Gifford! Dr. E—— was unwilling to credit this statement, but the proofs were too flagrant. He asked me what became of that band of patriots that swarmed in our younger days, that were so glowing-hot, desperate, and noisy in the year 1794? I said I could not tell; but referred him to our present Poet-Laureate for an account of them!
——‘Can these things be,
And overcome us like a summer-cloud,
Without a special wonder?’
I suspect it is peculiar to the English not to answer the letters of their friends abroad. They know you are anxious to hear, and have a surly, sullen pleasure in disappointing you. To oblige is a thing abhorrent to their imaginations; to be uneasy at not hearing from home just when one wishes, is a weakness which they cannot encourage. Any thing like a responsibility attached to their writing is a kind of restraint upon their free-will, an interference with their independence. There is a sense of superiority in not letting you know what you wish to know, and in keeping you in a state of helpless suspense. Besides, they think you are angry at their not writing, and would make them if you could; and they show their resentment of your impatience and ingratitude by continuing not to write.—One thing truly edifying in the accounts from England, is the number of murders and robberies with which the newspapers abound. One would suppose that the repetition of the details, week after week, and day after day, might stagger us a little as to our superlative idea of the goodness, honesty, and industry of the English people. No such thing: whereas one similar fact occurring once a year abroad fills us with astonishment, and makes us ready to dub the Italians (without any further inquiry) a nation of assassins and banditti. It is not safe to live or travel among them. Is it not strange, that we should persist in drawing such wilful conclusions from such groundless premises? A murder or a street-robbery in London is a matter of course[[46]]: accumulate a score of these under the most aggravated circumstances one upon the back of the other, in town and country, in the course of a few weeks—they all go for nothing; they make nothing against the English character in the abstract; the force of prejudice is stronger than the weight of evidence. The process of the mind is this; and absurd as it appears, is natural enough. We say (to ourselves) we are English, we are good people, and therefore the English are good people. We carry a proxy in our bosoms for the national character in general. Our own motives are ‘very stuff o’ the conscience,’ and not like those of barbarous foreigners. Besides, we know many excellent English people, and the mass of the population cannot be affected in the scale of morality by the outrages of a few ruffians, which instantly meet with the reward they merit from wholesome and excellent laws. We are not to be moved from this position, that the great body of the British public do not live by thieving and cutting the throats of their neighbours, whatever the accounts in the newspapers might lead us to suspect. The streets are lined with bakers’, butchers’, and haberdashers’ shops, instead of night-cellars and gaming-houses; and are crowded with decent, orderly, well-dressed people, instead of being rendered impassable by gangs of swindlers and pickpockets. The exception does not make the rule. Nothing can be more clear or proper; and yet if a single Italian commit a murder or a robbery, we immediately form an abstraction of this individual case, and because we are ignorant of the real character of the people or state of manners in a million of instances, take upon us, like true Englishmen, to fill up the blank, which is left at the mercy of our horror-struck imaginations, with bugbears and monsters of every description. We should extend to others the toleration and the suspense of judgment we claim; and I am sure we stand in need of it from those who read the important head of ‘Accidents and Offences’ in our Journals. It is true an Italian baker, some time ago, shut his wife up in an oven, where she was burnt to death; the heir of a noble family stabbed an old woman to rob her of her money; a lady of quality had her step-daughter chained to a bed of straw, and fed on bread and water till she lost her senses. This translated into vulgar English means that all the bakers’ wives in Italy are burnt by their husbands at a slow fire; that all the young nobility are common bravoes; that all the step-mothers exercise unheard-of and unrelenting cruelty on the children of a former marriage. We only want a striking frontispiece to make out a tragic volume. As the traveller advances into the country, robbers and rumours of robbers fly before him with the horizon. In Italy,
‘Man seldom is—but always to be robbed.’
At Turin, they told me it was not wise to travel by a vetturino to Florence without arms. At Florence, I was told one could not walk out to look at an old ruin in Rome, without expecting to see a Lazzaroni start from behind some part of it with a pistol in his hand. ‘There’s no such thing;’ but hatred has its phantoms as well as fear; and the English traduce and indulge their prejudices against other nations in order to have a pretence for maltreating them. This moral delicacy plays an under-game to their political profligacy. I am at present kept from proceeding forward to Naples by imaginary bands of brigands that infest the road the whole way. The fact is, that a gang of banditti, who had committed a number of atrocities and who had their haunts in the mountains near Sonino, were taken up about three years ago, to the amount of two and thirty: four of them were executed at Rome, and their wives still get their living in this city by sitting as models to artists, on account of the handsomeness of their features and the richness of their dresses. As to courtesans, from which one cannot separate the name of Italy even in idea, I have seen but one person answering to this description since I came, and I do not even know that this was one. But I saw a girl in white (an unusual thing) standing at some distance at the corner of one of the bye-streets in Rome; after looking round her for a moment, she ran hastily up the street again, as if in fear of being discovered, and a countryman who was passing with a cart at the time, stopped to look and hiss after her. If the draymen in London were to stop to gape and hoot at all the girls they see standing at the corners of streets in a doubtful capacity, they would have enough to do. But the tide of public prostitution that pours down all our streets is considered by some moralists as a drain to carry off the peccant humours of private life, and to keep the inmost recesses of the female breast sweet and pure from blemish! If this is to be the test, we have indeed nearly arrived at the idea of a perfect commonwealth.