The collected works of William Hazlitt, Vol. 10 (of 12)

by William Hazlitt

‘Mr. Coleridge having been dishonoured at Cambridge for preaching Deism, has, since that time, left his native country; commenced citizen of the world; left his poor children fatherless, and his wife destitute. Ex hoc disce omnes—his friend Southey and others.’

This is the way in which a man of the most exemplary habits and strict morals was included in the same sentence of reprobation with one of greater genius, though perhaps of more irregular conduct; while the imputations in both cases were impudent falsehoods—probably known to be so, or else founded on some idle report, eagerly caught up and maliciously exaggerated. What has been the effect? Why, that these very persons have, in the end, joined that very pack of hunting-tigers that strove to harass them to death, and now halloo longest and loudest in the chase of blood. Nor was the result, after all, so unnatural as it might at first appear. They saw that there was but one royal road to reputation. The new Temple of Fame was built as an outwork to the rotten boroughs, and the warders were busy on the top of it, pouring down scalding lead and horrible filth on all those who approached, and demanded entrance, without well-attested political credentials. ‘The manna’ of court favour ‘was falling’; and our pilgrims to the land of promise, slowly, reluctantly, but perhaps wisely, got out of the way of it. Who, indeed, was likely to stand, for any length of time, ‘the pelting of this pitiless storm’—the precipitation of nicknames from such a height, the thundering down of huge volumes of dirt and rubbish, the ugly blows at character, the flickering jests on personal defects—with the complacent smiles of the great, and the angry shouts of the mob, to say nothing of the Attorney-General’s informations, filed ex officio, and the well-paid depositions of spies and informers? It was a hard battle to fight. The enemy were well entrenched on the heights of place and power, and skulked behind their ramparts—those whom they assailed were exposed, and on the pavé. It was the forlorn hope of genius and independence struggling for fame and bread; and it is no wonder that many of the candidates turned tail, and fled from such fearful odds.

The beauty of it is, that there is generally no reparation or means of redress. From the nature of the imputations, it is frequently impossible distinctly to refute them, or to gain a hearing to the refutation. But if the calumniators are detected and exposed, they plead authority and the King’s privilege! They assume a natural superiority over you, as if, being of a different party, you were of an inferior species, and justly liable to be tortured, worried, and hunted to death, like any other vermin. They have a right to say what they please of you, to invent or propagate any falsehood or misrepresentation that suits their turn. The greater falsehood, the more merit; the more barefaced the imposture, the more pious the fraud. You are a Whig, a reformer—does not that of itself imply all other crimes and misdemeanours? That being once granted, they have a clear right to heap every other outrage, every other indignity, upon you as a matter of course; and you cannot complain of that which is no more than a commutation of punishment. You are an enthusiast in the cause of liberty: does it not follow that you must be a bad poet? You are against Ministers; is it to be supposed that you can write a line of prose without repeated offences against sense and grammar? If it be once admitted that you are an opposition writer of some weight and celebrity, it follows, of course, that the government scribbler should get a carte blanche to fill up your character and pretensions, life, parentage, and education. Your mind and morals are, in justice, deodands to the Crown, and should be handed over to the court critic to be dissected without mercy, like the body of a condemned malefactor. The disproportion between the fact and the allegation only points the moral the more strongly against you; for the odiousness of your conduct, in differing with men in office and their sycophants, is such, that no colours can be black enough to paint it; and if you are not really guilty of all the petty vices and absurdities imputed to you, it is plain that you ought to be so, to answer to their theory, and as a fiction in loyalty, for the credit of church and state. You are a bad subject, they pretend: that you are a bad writer and bad man, is a self-evident consequence that will be at once admitted by all the respectable and well-disposed part of the community. You are entitled, in short, neither to justice nor mercy: and he who volunteers to deprive you of a livelihood or your good name by any means, however atrocious or dastardly, is entitled to the thanks of his own country.

One of their most common expedients is, to strew their victim over and over with epithets of abuse, and to trust to the habitual association between words and things for the effect of their application. There was an instance of this, some little time ago, in a well-known paper, with which we shall exemplify our doctrine. It was in reference to the assault made on Sir Hudson Lowe by young Las Casas.

‘A French lad, of the name of Las Casas, the son of one of Buonaparte’s Counts, waylaid Sir Hudson Lowe in the street on Tuesday, and struck him, because Sir Hudson did his duty properly, as an English Governor, at St. Helena, and as keeper of the miscreant of whom he had the charge. The Chronicle put forth yesterday a letter without an address, said to be from the boy himself, signed Baron ——, something. In this he confesses the assault, which, in default of other witnesses, will substantiate the fact, and consign him, as soon as the thief-takers can catch him, no doubt to the pleasing recreation of the tread-mill for a given time.’

We pass over the terms ‘miscreant,’—‘fellow,’ &c.; but there is a refinement, in one part of this paragraph, worth notice. It is said, as if casually, that the ‘thief-takers were after him.’ What! had he been accused of picking pockets, of shop-lifting, or petty larceny? No; but though the fact was known to be quite different, the feeling, it was thought, would be the same. His offence would be transferred, by the operation of this choice expression, to the class of misdemeanors which thief-takers are employed to look after; and thus young Las Casas, for resenting the unworthy treatment of his father and old master, has an indirect imputation fastened on him, by which he is confounded in the imagination with felons and housebreakers, and other persons for whom the ‘tread-mill’ is a suitable punishment! Such is the force of words—the power of prejudice—and the means of poisoning public opinion.

Take another illustration in a native instance. A man of classical taste and attainments appears to be editor of an Opposition Journal. He publishes (it is the fault of his stars) an elegant and pathetic poem. The first announcement of the work, in a Ministerial publication, sets out with a statement, that the author has lately been relieved from Newgate—which gives a felon-like air to the production, and makes it necessary for the fashionable reader to perform a sort of quarantine against it, as if it had the gaol-infection. It is declared by another critic, in the same pay, to be unreadable from its insipidity, and afterwards, by the same critic, to be highly pernicious and inflammatory—a slight contradiction, but no matter! This, and fifty other inconsistencies, would all go down, provided they were equally malignant and unblushing. The writer may contradict himself as often as he pleases: if he only speaks against the work, his criticism is sound and orthodox. Nor is it only obnoxious writers on politics themselves, but all their friends and acquaintance, or those whom they casually notice, that come under this sweeping anathema. It is proper to make a clear stage. The friends of Cæsar must not be suspected of an amicable intercourse with patriotic and incendiary writers. A young poet comes forward: an early and favourable notice appears of some boyish verses of his in the Examiner, independently of all political opinion. That alone decides his fate; and from that moment he is set upon, pulled in pieces, and hunted into his grave by the whole venal crew in full cry after him. It was crime enough that he dared to accept praise from so disreputable a quarter. He should have thrown back his bounty in the face of the donor, and come with his manuscript in his hand, to have poetical justice dealt out to him by the unbiassed author of the Baviad and Mæviad! His tenderness and beauties would then have been exalted with faint praise, instead of being mangled and torn to pieces with ruthless, unfeeling rage; his faults would have been gently hinted at, and attributed to youth and inexperience; and his profession, instead of being made the subject of loud ribald jests by vile buffoons, would have been introduced to enhance the merit of his poetry. But a different fate awaited poor Keats! His fine fancy and powerful invention were too obvious to be treated with mere neglect; and as he had not been ushered into the world with the court-stamp upon him, he was to be crushed as a warning to genius how it keeps company with honesty, and as a sure means of inoculating the ingenuous spirit and talent of the country with timely and systematic servility! We sometimes think that writers are alarmed at the praises that even we bestow upon them, lest it should preclude them from the approbation of the authorized sources of fame!

This system thus pursued is intended to amount, and in fact does amount, to a prohibition to authors to write, and to the public to read any works that have not the Government mark upon them. The professed object is to gag the one, and hoodwink the others, and to persuade the world that all talent, taste, elegance, science, liberality and virtue, are confined to a few hack-writers and their employers. One would think the public would resent this gross attempt to impose on their understandings, and encroach on their liberty of private judgment. When a gentleman is reading a new work, of which he is beginning to form a favourable opinion, is it to be borne that he should have it snatched out of his hands, and tossed into the dirt by a retainer of the literary police? Can he be supposed to pick it up afterwards, either to read himself, or to lend it to a friend, sullied and disfigured as it is? But the truth we fear is, that the public, besides their participation in the same prejudices, are timid, indolent, and easily influenced by a little swaggering and an air of authority. They like to amuse their leisure with reading a new work; and if they have more leisure, have no objection to fill it up with listening to an abuse of the writer. If they approve of candour and equity in the abstract, they do not disapprove of a little scandal and tittle-tattle by the by. They take in a disgusting publication, because it is ‘amusing and clever’—that is, full of incredible assertions which make them stare, and of opprobrious epithets applied to high characters, which, by their smartness and incongruity, operate as a lively stimulus to their ordinary state of ennui. This happens on the Sunday morning; and the rest of the week passes in unravelling the imposture, and expressing a very edifying mixture of wonder and indignation at it. Such a paper was detected, not long ago, in the fabrication of a low falsehood against a most respectable gentleman, who was said to have proposed a dinner and rump and dozen, in triumph over the death of Lord Castlereagh. This was said to have taken place in a public room, so that the exposure of the falsehood was immediate and complete. Not long before, it put a leading question to a popular member for the city, as if some ill-conduct of his had caused his father’s death: it was shown that this gentleman’s father had died before he was born! Is it to be supposed that the writer knew the facts? We should rather think not. He probably neither knew nor cared any thing about them. It was his vocation to hazard the dark insinuation, and to trust to chance and the malice of mankind for its success. The blow was well meant, though it failed. But was it not a blow to the paper itself? Alas, no; it still blunders on; and the public gape after it, half in fear half in indignation. It slanders a virtuous lady; it insults the misfortunes of a Noble House; it rakes up the infirmities of the dead; it taints (for whatever it touches it contaminates) the unborn. No matter. They or their family had sinned in being Whigs—and there are still men in England, it would appear, who think that this is the way by which differences of opinion should be revenged or prevented.

It used to be the boast of English gentlemen, that their political contentions were conducted in a spirit, not merely of perfect fairness, but of mutual courtesy and urbanity; and that, even among the lower orders, quarrels were governed by a law of honour and chivalry, which proscribed all base advantages, and united all the spectators against him by whom a foul blow was given or attempted. We trust that this spirit is not yet extinguished among us; and that it will speedily assert itself, by trampling under foot that base system of mean and malignant defamation, by which our Periodical Press has recently been polluted and disgraced. We would avoid naming works that desire nothing so much as notoriety; but it is but too well known, that the work of intimidation and deceit, of cruel personality and audacious fabrication, has been carried on, for several years, in various periodical publications, daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly,—that it has been urged with unrelenting eagerness in the metropolis, in spite of the public discountenance of the leaders of the party which it disgraces by its pretended support; and then propagated into various parts of the country, for purposes of local annoyance. It is equally well known and understood too, that this savage system of bullying and assassination is no longer pursued from the impulse of angry passions or furious prejudices, but on a cold-blooded mercenary calculation of the profits which idle curiosity, and the vulgar appetite for slander, may enable its authors to derive from it. Where this is to stop, we do not presume to conjecture,—unless the excess leads to the remedy, and the distempered appetite of the public be surfeited, and so die. This is by no means an unlikely, and, we hope, may be a speedy consummation. In the mean time, the extent and extravagance of the abuse has already had the effect, not only of making individual attacks less painful or alarming, but even, in many cases, of pointing out to the judicious the proper objects of their gratitude and respect. For ourselves, at least, we do not hesitate to acknowledge, that, when we find an author savagely and perseveringly attacked by this gang of literary retainers, we immediately feel assured, not only that he is a good writer, but an honest man; and if a statesman is once selected as the butt of outrageous abuse in the same quarter, we consider it as a satisfactory proof that he has lately rendered some signal service to his country, or aimed a deadly blow at corruption.

We have put ourselves out of breath with this long lecture on the great opprobrium of our periodical literature,—and dare not now go on to the ticklish chapter of Reviews. We do not, however, by any means renounce the design; and hope one day to be enabled to resume it, and to astonish our readers with a full and ingenuous account of our own merits and demerits, and those of our rivals.